Fell On Black Days

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday. I had some candles burning for most of the day and I listened to music for the first time in a long while. Really listened. To music for 'adults.' I think Jessica was slightly perturbed to realise that not all music is 'Old MacDonald had a farm' although her Dad has been known to blast her with Black Sabbath and their ilk on the odd occasion. She seems to quite like that sort of thing actually, kicks her legs along to it.

I feel so very sad. I can't sleep which is I am sitting here typing this at four in the morning instead.

I wish I could do more than light candles. For all of those before me, for all of those yet to come. All those women still walking around in the sunshine in blissful ignorance of how this particular pregnancy is going to end. This particular pregnancy is not going to end well. Every single day of the year. I do so, so wish I could save them from this. Somehow.

Perhaps it is the date. This tail end of summer last year, when my life broke down. I know that it is only another day, one in a sequence. But I find my mind drawn back to replaying those events more and more frequently in recent days.

I've been dreaming about the NICU. That place. 'At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; at the still point, there the dance is. But neither arrest nor movement.' That is how it felt to me. Like a place that had fallen out of time. No arrest. No movement. A place parallel to my previous existence, I stepped sideways and there I was. It's still there, that strange sideways place. My four month home. Other people live there now. I wish they didn't have to.

That place of breath held and held and held. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Months of waiting. Seasons of waiting. Summer, autumn, winter.
One moment idle chatter, jokes, elation and the next, utter despair. For someone. Part of you is praying that it isn't you. And you loathe yourself for that.
That churning in my stomach. Cries.
Those rooms, I felt as if I could blow them away with one breath, like a flimsy stage set. Knock the whole thing down with a flick of my wrist.

That place. Those walls. Hope, crushed hope, every shade in between. How many prayers prayed, bargains struck, pleas pleaded. Such frail, fleshy, human things to be offered up in the face of these machines, those tiny, impossible bodies. Granted or denied.

Sitting on the floor in a hospital corridor. My husband is speaking to me but I can't really hear him. It is almost as if he is talking through thick glass or heavy salt water. I also hear myself wailing, at a remove. Me yet not me. I know that I sound like an animal but I can't stop. I'm gone, lost, a vacuum.

Sometimes I feel I have never really left that hospital. A part of me is still sitting on the floor in that corridor wailing. I think she'll always be there, that strange, wailing creature.

I'm still waiting.
I've been holding my breath for nearly a year now.
I want my other daughter back. I want her back. My greed know no bounds. These clutching hands that always close on nothing. I want her. I want her.
Still. Always.