It tore the air from my lungs so completely that for a second, I forgot how to breathe.
My hand trembled where it rested against the little girl’s back.
I had once been heavily pregnant, carrying a child—my child.
The memory rose with brutal suddenness, stealing the warmth from my skin.
The pregnancy scan had shown she was a girl.
I remembered how anxious I had been afterward, counting down the days until I could finally hold her, clinging to that certainty like it was the only beautiful thing life had ever given me without cruelty attached to it.
In the darkness my world had become, I had built an entire future around her.
I imagined everything constantly—what she would look like when I finally gave birth to her, whether she would have my mouth or my mother’s nose, whether her hair would curl softly at the ends the way mine once had.
But more than anything, I imagined her hands.
Tiny fingers wrapping around mine for the very first time, gripping with that strange newborn strength babies had, as though they arrived already knowing how desperately they needed to hold on to someone.
I used to sit alone in silence for hours, tracing the shape of that future entirely in my mind, memorizing moments that had not even happened yet.
My blindness would never have stopped me from loving my daughter properly, from raising her with every ounce of care and devotion a mother was supposed to give.
I used to imagine her growing older beside me, blessed with the sight I no longer had, describing the world to me in that soft, excited little voice children used when they wanted you to see exactly what they saw.
The colors of the sky at sunset.
The shape of clouds drifting across summer afternoons.
The way people looked when they smiled sincerely—or when they lied through their teeth while pretending kindness.
She would have become my eyes in all the gentlest ways.
Her voice would have painted the world back into existence for me, piece by piece, until neither of us remembered what it felt like to live surrounded only by darkness.
I swallowed hard, my throat tightening painfully.
I had needed to believe—
That her presence would chase away the shadows I carried, soften the edges of everything that had been done to me.
That something good—
Something pure—
Could come out of something so wrong.
But on the ninth month—
Everything shattered.
A sharp, tearing agony had ripped through my body on the very day I was meant to bring my child into the world.
The pain came so suddenly, so violently, it stole the air from my lungs before I could even comprehend what was happening.
I remembered doubling over on the hospital bed, one hand clutching my stomach as confusion struck a heartbeat before terror did.
Then everything descended into chaos.
