Almost Two

This is the day when every minute has historical significance. When I was making curtains, eating chocolate, getting my haircut. We had takeout tacos for dinner. I was having abdominal muscle spasms which I hoped were baby movements. I freaked right the hell out and went to the hospital.

That sonogram.

Two years ago, today, she was dead. Two years ago, tomorrow, she was born. Two years ago, yesterday, was the last day of my blissfully naive life.

The weather this January, so far, has been freakishly warm. Unsettlingly so. It is giving me that nauseating feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or the other eight feet of snow to drop. The weather two years ago, right now, was blisteringly cold. The night we went to hospital, in fact, was the coldest day that month. And still, while waiting to deliver my dead daughter, I was waiting for that other shoe to drop.

Two years. I look back at my life, then, and am amazed by how far we've come. The milestones are too many to list. But we are a different family. I am a different person, almost entirely.

And yet she is still dead. That stays the same no matter how much we grow.

I am still caught winded by pregnancy announcements, by third babies, by little girls with curly hair and blue eyes and who are two. It stings much less now. The sting is not entirely gone.

Her death has not defined who I am, but it is maybe the most real part of me. It is immoveable, unchangeable; it is woven throughout my speech, my thoughts, every action.

It is all I have of my daughter. And I miss her so very much.