It’s
amazing to love someone that will never actually be. That’s how I felt about
you. I loved you before I knew you were there, I loved you for the short time
you were there and I continue to love you long after you were gone.
When does
a person have a soul? It’s a question that has been asked over and over by politicians,
religions, activist, feminists and scientists. But I know. It’s the second
someone loves you, and it’s all the time before that and all the time after
that. You never have to breathe, or
think or feel to have a soul. The person who loves you gives you the soul. And
I loved you. I wanted to you. And I still want you.
I only held you in my womb for a short time and only knew
you were there for four days before you were gone. Yet I knew you. I’ll never
know if you have blues as deep as the sea or brown eyes like me that are like
the covers of long epic books that hold hundreds of stories. I’ll never know
the curves of your lips and the possibility that would have been spoken upon
them. Or if your hair would have been luscious and thick or light and baby
fine. But I know you. I know you loved me, I know you wanted to live and you wanted
to breathe the same I air I breathe. You wanted to be held, safely and tightly
in warm arms. And you would have been. You would have known pain in this life
but I would have held you through it. Wherever you walked, I would have been
there beside you until my last breath and beyond.
I don’t know why you couldn’t stay but I don’t blame you. My
body was not prepared to be your vessel and my body had to let you go. My heart
and my mind will always hold you, even though my body slowly, traumatically
bled you out. I pray it was peaceful for you and that you are wrapped in some
warm place now. That you didn’t exist to be just because I failed to let you
live. I cannot imagine that you would be
created, so beautiful even though unseen to fade away like the sun on a warm
day never to rise again on some other horizon.
There’s no ceremony to say good-bye to you. There’s stone
that says “here lies a beautiful soul.” There’s no black dress and tear sodden
tissues left over. You are nothing to the rest of the world, but me. To me you
are still everything.
I have prayed for a lot of things in my life, but I never
knew the meaning of prayer until I curled my body tight around you, and begged
for you stay. I pleaded with whatever god wanted to listen. I prayed to you as
if you could hear, promising anything as long as you would stay with me. I
promised you knowledge, all that I know and all that I would learn for you. I
promised you art and color since that’s what you would have given me. I
promised you travel to anywhere your fancy would take you, because I know the
taste of culture in the air. I promised you music; that you would know the
sweet simple notes that could move you to tears or to smiles or to dancing. I
promised you love. The love to keep you and hold you, the love to protect you,
the love to kiss you, the love to teach you and the love to one day let you go,
readied into the world.
But you’re gone. Perhaps there will be another, but you will
be my first love. You will always be the hole in my heart. I will always miss
you so much that longing will not be an emotion but a physical pain. I will
always feel you and will dream of you. I know someday I will have to let you go,
to take away the black veil of mourning from my eyes and see the world as full
again. You died in the dead of winter, but I will plant you into the early
spring so that the seasons will carry you on the wind instead of stirring and
stuck into my nightmares. You need to know that you are always loved and are
always wanted. My empty womb is your epitaph and my empty heart is your
sepulcher.
