Here There Be Monsters

Here There Be Monsters

I never saw the world through rose-colored glasses. It’s just not my nature. Pick any classic pick-me-up phrase: the glass is half full, every cloud has a silver lining, when God closes a door He opens a window. I grew up hearing them ricochet off kitchen walls and church hallways, tossed out by people who needed the sound of hope more than the truth of it. They spoke those words like prayers. Or maybe like armor. Maybe like a way to cover the trembling flesh underneath.

But glasses shatter and spill. Clouds can bruise the sky and bleed acid rain. And if God keeps opening windows instead of doors, I can’t help wondering why, exactly, He expects us to crawl out of the mess He made.

What I’m trying to say is that I never believed in neat paths or promised destinations. I was taught that if you made a plan, life would follow it, obedient as a dog on a leash, and in the same breath I watched those adults stagger beneath storms that didn’t care about their blueprints. I learned early that maps were for people who trusted the terrain. I wasn’t one of them.

What I didn’t know (not yet) was that the body has its own kind of geography. That it can redraw its borders without permission. That one day mine would become a country I didn’t know how to live in, marked by a loss I didn’t have a map for, didn’t even know could exist until I was already wandering through the wreckage of it.

*****

I was twenty-one when I found out I was pregnant. Alone, barefoot on a cold tile floor, staring at myself in the mirror, I felt something tilt inside me; a tectonic shift I wasn’t ready for. I imagined futures I didn’t know how to hold: strollers and tiny socks and my body becoming a country I no longer recognized. My mind whirled with questions I didn’t have language for: How will I tell my parents? What will my baby look like? Who will I become? I didn’t know then that none of those futures were waiting for me.

I did tell my boyfriend. He was elated, almost relieved, as if the years we’d spent together finally made sense in this new light. He started sketching baby names, researching doulas, calling his mother before I’d even caught my breath. I sat on the sofa and watched him orbit around me, bright with a joy I couldn’t reach. I didn’t call my parents. It turned out I would never have to.

People talk about pregnancy like it’s a linear trail: a path from a missed period to a rounded belly to a name whispered joyfully in a hospital room. They talk about motherhood like a destination, a final dot on the map. No one talks about the blank spaces in between, the places where the ground buckles, where the ink fades, where the trail just… stops.

There is no map for a life dying inside your own body. No one told me that losing something you never fully had could feel like a door slamming shut inside your ribs. No one warned me how quietly the body can grieve, how it can ache with a sorrow it was never given permission to speak. If someone had drawn a map for this, maybe it would have looked like a coastline eroding, or like a heart breaking along fault lines, or like a cave. Definitely like a cave.

*****

The middle part is the hardest to write about: the days that followed, where nothing looked different but everything felt altered. I went to work and came home. My apartment was the same but somehow felt empty, vast and cold. My boyfriend was there, sometimes. Once he brought his mom, and she cried and hugged me and said it would be okay as if that meant something as I felt the remnants of my baby slowly leak out of my body. I was a shadow and I moved through the world like a whisper. No one saw me, really. I couldn’t see me.

Inside my chest, something was clawing. A monster without a name. I’d heard stories of old maps, the kind sailors carried when the world still felt endless. In the blank stretches of parchment (places unexplored, dangerous, unknown) the cartographers would ink a warning:

Here there be monsters.

I kept thinking about that phrase. How the monsters weren’t the problem. Ignorance was. Not knowing what waited, not knowing what lurked and limped under the surface. They should’ve written that on my skin. Across my stomach. On the inside of my wrists. Somewhere I could see it.

Here there be monsters.

The kind that come creeping in when you’re too young and too alone. The kind that curl in your gut and whisper, “This is your fault and you know it.” They take the shape of silence because you don’t know who to tell or how to begin.

My body wasn’t a place I knew anymore. Every familiar landmark had shifted. I sat in my car after work one day, remembering an old teacher (maybe the one who taught me about the maps?) explaining how ancient explorers navigated by the stars, and how whole civilizations learned to read the sky. I stared out the window and tried to imagine a star bright enough to guide me out of myself.

At night I’d lie awake and press my palm to my stomach, the way people press a hand to a windowpane: gently, as if something might answer back. But nothing answered.

That was the cruelest part.

*****

If this is a map, then grief is the compass, spinning to nowhere and everywhere at once.

The end didn’t come all at once, either. Endings rarely honor boundaries. Instead they seep, they drift, they dissolve slowly until one day you realize the monster has stopped clawing and started (mostly) sleeping.

There was a morning, many months later, when I woke up and noticed the air felt different. Not lighter, but breathable in a way it hadn’t been. I made myself breakfast. I walked outside. The world was the same, but I wasn’t. I remember staring at a tree in the yard, the bark rough and peeling, a little wounded-looking but stubbornly alive, and thinking, I know exactly how you feel.

The healing didn’t come in straight lines. It didn’t follow north or south. It arrived in spirals, in tiny shifts, in memories that softened at the edges like old paper. I told myself to remember that maps become outdated, and territories change, and sometimes a place which was once labeled danger can become something else entirely. I didn’t forget, I just learned to carry it differently.

Sometimes I wonder who I would be if it hadn’t happened. If the path behind me would twist a different way, whether the person writing these words would have a clearer road behind her, or ahead. But the fact remains; the map of my life was redrawn that year. New borders, new terrain, and new warnings written in the margins, this time in my own handwriting: Be gentle here. The soil is soft.

I am older now. Not yet old, but older. And I have walked far enough to look back without flinching. When I trace that time, I don’t just see the monster. I see the girl who braved it alone. I see the empty spaces she had no language for. I see the shadows she learned to live with.

And if I could reach back and place a map in her hands (just a scrap of paper, a torn page from a notebook) I know exactly what I’d draw. Not a straight path. Not a clear destination. Not a warning.

I’d sketch a small circle. A single mark. A point on the map that simply says:

You survive this.

Because sometimes the only map you need is the one that leads you forward, even if you don’t know where forward is yet.

Even if the monster is inside you.

Even when the path is dark.

Even though the cartographers never thought to draw this place at all.