FOR
I prepared for everything. Probabilities. Contingencies. That was just how I was wired.
I prepared the room. Painted it in the third month. Pale yellow. My mother called the next day, said I was tempting fate, that you don’t set up a room before the baby is even safe. We argued about it twice but I painted anyway. The first colour looked off once it dried so I did the whole thing again.
I prepared my body. Took the supplements every morning. Lined them up on the kitchen counter the night before so I wouldn’t forget. Fixed my sleep. Went through old stuff in my head. Anxieties I had been carrying for years were finally given a reason to work through.
I prepared Rahul next. That took the longest. Uncertainty made him go quiet and I knew from twelve years of knowing him that if I didn’t bring him along slowly, he would still be catching up six months in.
You prepare and prepare. You think the effort counts. You think the universe keeps track and rewards the careful ones.
It doesn’t.
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SALE
People were kind. Cards. Flowers on the doorstep.
Priya from work held both my hands in the corridor and said everything happens for a reason. I nodded and smiled, went to the bathroom and sat there for eleven minutes.
His mother cried more than I did. Holding my face in her hands, she wept, as I stood there not knowing what expression I was supposed to have.
There is a particular exhaustion in managing other people’s grief about your grief. In being the one who reassures. In being the one who says we’re okay. While not being okay.
I sold the crib first. That part I managed.
The shoes were different. I don’t fully know why.
They just were. They took eleven months.
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BABY
I’d decided you would like mornings. No real reason. Just a feeling from those early hours when you moved most, a restlessness just before five that woke me up often.
I imagined you being stubborn about small things.
Loyal to one toy until it fell apart. Mispronouncing something in a way I would never have the heart to correct it. Not even once.
I imagined teaching you to swim. Not the actual swimming, but the moment that comes before it. You standing at the edge of the pool deciding whether my outstretched hands were worth trusting. I don’t know why but I kept coming back to that one particular moment.
I imagined you asleep against my shoulder. Your fingers finding my hair even in sleep, tugging lightly. Never figured out which side you’d have preferred.
I was still waiting to find out what you smelled like. Had a feeling it would be something I couldn’t describe to anyone else. Something only I would know.
I never found out.
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SHOES
Light-brown. Soft-soled. Silver ribbon on each one. I bought them at seven months, earlier than I had planned. I saw them and that was that.
I kept them in the box. Sometimes I would open it and just look. Then close it again.
I moved them three times.
To the bedside drawer.
To the top of the wardrobe.
To the spare room. I put them in a bag, and pushed them farther to the back.
Told myself I was keeping them because I might need them again. For practical reasons. Kept telling myself this for eleven months.
I was never a convincing liar.
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NEVER
The doctor used a clinical word. I wrote it down on the back of a receipt so I wouldn’t have to ask her to repeat it.
Rahul said ‘never’ two days later. We were at the kitchen table and he just said it, quietly, not meaning any harm by it. I didn’t speak to him properly for three weeks after that and I couldn’t explain why, even when he asked. It was the same information the doctor had given me. Just a different word, I wasn’t ready to hear it yet.
But never doesn’t leave room. Never.
I didn’t cry at the clinic. I cried the following Thursday. Standing at the kitchen sink, chopping onions I forgot what for, I started crying. No reason I could point to. Just Thursday afternoon, and then I was crying.
I was on the kitchen floor for a while.
Then I got up.
You just get up. There isn’t really another option.
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WORN
The morning I posted the ad I did something I hadn’t planned on doing.
I took the shoes out of the box and tied the ribbons loosely around my wrist and stood in the kitchen like that while the milk boiled. Just for a few minutes. I can’t explain it properly. I just wanted them worn once, even if it was only that, even if it was just me standing in my kitchen at five in the morning with baby shoes tied around my wrist like something had gone wrong with me.
Maybe something had. I don’t know.
I took the photo. Typed nearly new. Stopped. Typed never worn instead. Posted.
I tied the box shut and left it by the door. Poured my tea. Drank it while it was still hot.
I washed my cup and put it away.
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**Dedicated to my mother who had a stillborn before me.**
