Babies and Maybes

When I first started this blog, I imagined it would be an elegant meditation on grief. It didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t care about eloquence, that I would pass up opportunities to write about beautiful things. That I would have so much to say about other people, that other people would have reasons to grieve at the same time that I did. That it is possible to feel bad about so many different things at once and to find comfort from the very same people who have hurt you.

The last two days have been draining – the friend with cancer, my sister, my depressed mother, my aborted fetus, my own ongoing non-relationship issues. All of these people occupy discrete spaces somewhere in me, each of them a kind of sorrow.

But here I sit in the middle of a crowded restaurant in the East Village, looking forward to a nice evening. My stomach is in knots--because I am hungry and because I am nervous.

I am not unhappy, exactly. How is that possible? Maybe what I am is a liar.

I don’t know what I am looking forward to. The future seems so bleak. My mother is aging faster than I imagined she would. She gets sadder every time I talk to her. The older she gets, the more she finds to regret.

My friend has cancer and no one knows how this will shake out yet. I fear the worst. It’s my nature. What will her life be like in one week? I think of that and her, and my eyes cloud over a bit. I want to cry for her, but we're nowhere near that yet. It could be nothing. And tears are the last thing she needs to see from her friends.

I am still alone and fumbling in a world of men who don’t quite see me. I am still involved with my ex. We communicate almost every day, we have slept together twice. What do we want from each other? It would be so easy to label this something, that we have become sleazy together. How much truth is in that statement?

I suspect I am being weak even as I tell myself I am strong. What am I doing?

I will be alone for a long time I think. This is not what I want to happen, but something in me resists leaving the last few months behind. Is it the aborted fetus? Do I love A so much that I am willing to take whatever I can from him? Does he love me so much that he is willing to risk new love for old me? Fucking me can't be that much fun. How did I knowingly allow myself to turn out to be his bit on the side? Or are we just unprepared and/or unwilling to live with the decisions we’ve made?

Are we tied to one another more than other old lovers because we made a baby together? No one gets medals for making babies, especially when they turn out to be mistakes.

I just called my baby a mistake.

This afternoon I talked to A for two hours. We talked about everything and still it wasn’t enough time. What are we supposed to catch up on and what are we doing? It seems always to come down to babies and maybes. He blames himself, that if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, we would still be together. That’s probably true. But how badly did he want us to stay together and how badly did I want us to stay together?

How long would I have stayed knowing that all I would ever have with him is movies and breakfast and dating for all the time we are together? I am in love with someone who wants to be Peter Pan. And I want to be a grown-up.

Why isn’t that enough reason to stop loving someone?