Telling Truer Stories II – 2019

Ten or so years ago, when I was a child, I helped my mother bury a box in the garden. I say ``helped``, but all I did was sit on the dirt with my sister, and watch our mother cry, clutching a tiny shoebox in her arms.

All I knew was that for five months my mother was pregnant, and then one day she came home delicately clutching something wrapped in a piece of dirty cloth, and she was pregnant no more.

In a world where you can write your way into a promising tomorrow based on an ethereal air of innocence from the past, I find my body as a forest cathedral; my womb is not someone else's battleground, but a playground. A playground of a memory that plays hide and seek that brings both sadness and a weightlessness of bright light and breeze, dancing in an aria of rustling trees.

He never wanted to have kids. He hated kids. And besides, any children I have will immediately be considered my legal husband's child.

Yes, it was my choice. The same choice I would make if I could do it all over. But, even now, I still wonder if I could have made a different one.