Firstborn
She is born in July, the Atlanta hospital downtown. I am twenty years old, and I live in a 100-year-old house without air conditioning. The floorboards are as warm as the heavy, hot air. I walk from room to room to room in that house, five months pregnant, feeling the contractions wrap hot pain around my back and belly.
The night before, in a hospital bed, the on-call resident searched for a heartbeat. She did not find it. She measured the fetus. “Are you sure about the conception date?” she asked. I was. She showed me how big it should have been at 20 weeks. She told me, “When a fetus expires, it often shrinks.” Of course, just like a raisin, I thought, with no emotion. I stared at the grays of the ultrasound screen, the little coil that would have been my child, the white line the resident had drawn on top of it. “How long will it take?” I asked. “A day or two,” she said, but the next night, the cramps come hard and fast, and I pace the warm floors of my house and swat at mosquitoes that had broken through the window screens and touch the walls and furniture, fiddle with books and VHS tapes, look in the refrigerator, do everything I can do to avoid touching my own body. At some point after midnight, something snaps. The blood comes and keeps coming. Too much blood. A roommate calls the ambulance. The screen door behind me. Thick night air. My dog whines then howls from the front porch. The ambulance is cold. Hands shove a cannula in my nose. “I don’t need it, I can breathe, I can breathe that’s not why I’m here,” I say. “Standard procedure,” one of them says. At the hospital, they pile white towels on the wheelchair and change me into a gown. Both are soaked through before we make it to the room, so red. Tonight’s resident presses an IV into my arm and a needle into the IV and I breathe out instead of jerking my arm back as cold spiders up my arm, then burn, then numb. The numb creeps up into my face. Everything slows. I’m floating above it, the hemorrhage. Have to stop it, they say. Morphine, they say. Somehow, I am in the bed now with a new gown, and the bleeding has slowed. White blankets up to my armpits. A dark bag attached to my IV pole. Someone else’s blood. Hard to find, the nurse says, Rarest type, universal donor, but there’s almost no blood in her now ha ha. Then I’m alone. Then I’m not. The father sits bent on a chair beside my bed with his head on his knees. There’s another snap somewhere in the center of me then warm, deep warm, spreads over my lap and belly and legs. Red again. This time, it blossoms across the stark white hospital blanket. Beautiful, so lovely, those two colors, sharp white and red. The father runs out, comes back with a nurse. She throws back the blanket, looks between my legs, and I tell her, I’m cold, but she leaves fast without responding. She comes back with another nurse, then gloves, then one lifts up a little form. The father looks down at it. Girl or boy? I ask, but the father shakes his head and the nurse shakes her head and drops the body into the small biohazard bin, that red and black symbol on the front, a tangle of scythes.
The next day, when a nurse calls to follow up, I ask her for any information about the baby, the sex at least or maybe even why it died. I tell her about the medical waste bin. I am still floating a little but right beside the experience instead of ten feet above it. The nurse pauses long enough for me to say, “Hello?” She says, “I’m not sure why that happened. Sometimes, their little bodies break up during delivery. Not something you want to see anyway.” I say, “Okay,” and for years, it was.
Shoreline
Standing on the shoreline, sand the color of snow and salt, sand made from thousands of years of ground up quartz crystals and shells and the bones of sea creatures and let’s be honest, there are some people in this sand too and our things, the stuff of us, lost items and clothes, bits of boats and toys, pieces of concrete and siding that sloughed off in one of our storms. This sand feels like you’re stepping into a pile of powder when it’s dry. When it’s wet, the translucent teal water crashing and breaking and spreading out against your ankles, you sink into the sand. You sink and stay. You are a part of this place, now. You are not the Gulf. You are not a sea creature. Not the sand. You will not live here. You will not be buried here, not here, not your bones. You are a part of the long and temporary sliver, where water meets sand and your skin at the same time. For these moments, as long as you stay, you are the shoreline. If you allow yourself to sink, really sink into this moment, you will know in your body that you are alone inside of it. You will look around frantically, your ankles locked in the sand. Stay with me, you will say to anyone, anyone. Please, stay.
Ofelia
For years, I could ignore the space my first baby left behind, but when I couldn’t ignore it, I called her Ofelia. I decided on a daughter. The thing about death is, that space is always left behind: tiny, invisible silhouettes in the corner of our lives. I noticed it when I was a kid. My first pet died, a cat, the warm weight of her gone from the bottom of my bed. Then, the space grew into the shape of my father. Then both grandmothers, a cousin, two aunts, some friends, Ofelia.
Because I never saw Ofelia, she can be anything. I get to recreate her, over and over, just like any grief, and because of her, I have learned better how to grieve. To turn the grief around like a kaleidoscope. To watch the shapes and colors change. To notice the way I feel in my body as I watch. Sometimes, she is all the things she might have been: a baby, a gap-toothed child, a snotty preteen. Sometimes, she is a rush of dark hair. Sometimes, she is a silhouette made tangible, a space where light cannot enter. Sometimes, that silhouette is made of light itself, in the shape of a girl but filled with a swirl of colors or a shower of evermoving stars. She is my creation. She always was. When I allow myself to recreate her, to remember, again and again the sound of her body falling into that medical waste bin, the whisper of the plastic bag she fell into, the whoosh of that moment, that is all it takes for a person to disappear. Our bodies are tied to time, so limited, so small. The space she left behind soothes me, sometimes. I force myself to remember it, to remember that everything, everyone in your world grows brighter and more beautiful when you really know that they will end.
