Maybe this was the part of you I got to keep. Something nobody else could touch. Something nobody could lie about or take credit for or pull away from me.
Just mine.
Maybe eventually ours.
But I can’t lie, I don’t know that I wanted your lies to taint him.
But I was wrong. I was so wrong. I lost him, X.
And I don’t even know how to explain it in a way that makes sense.
One minute, I was talking to him, holding my stomach, telling him I was right there.
And the next thing I knew, I was on the floor, begging and crying.
I was trying to hold onto something my body had already decided to let go of. I kept telling him to stay. I kept telling him I had him. But my voice didn’t reach him. My hands couldn’t hold him. And my body refused to keep him.
All I could think about was how I never told you. How you didn’t even know he existed?
How there was something good in this world with your name on it, and now we’re both never going to meet him, we’re never going to hear him.
We’ll never know what we made. And I don’t know how to carry that. I don’t know how to sit with the fact that something lived inside me, and I couldn’t keep it alive. I don’t know how to pray after this, after I begged God to spare him. I don’t know how to believe anything I asked for was ever going to stay.
All I know is he was here, and I loved him. And now, there’s nothing left of him but this space inside me that won’t fill back up.
Not with time.
Not with anything.
I just feel empty, just like the day that you left me.
- Channy
I put down the pen, knowing I would never send the letter, but realizing the only thing inside me that still knew how to live went silent.
2007
Itold myself it was just for that night. Just one party. Just something to get out of my room and finally bond with Janessa the way freshman girls should bond with their roommate. She was thrilled and thought it would be good for me after everything I went through.
Because sitting there, alone and thinking of everything I had lost, was when everything came back to me in waves.
The arcade.
The ultrasound.
The sharp pain and that sterile hospital room.
That feeling in my body when everything just stopped. So when Janessa dragged me out that first time, I didn’t fight her. I didn’t argue. I just got dressed and followed her out the door.
The music hit me before we even walked in. It was loud and heavy. Usher’s “Yeah”crooned on the speaker system. The room felt alive. It was the complete opposite of everything I had been sitting in for weeks.
People were moving and laughing and were dancing like nothing in the world could touch them, and like nothing had ever been taken from them.
And for a second, just a second…I envied that.
“Don’t just stand there,” Janessa said, nudging me forward. “Relax. Have a drink. Indulge if you want,” Janessa swiped her pointer finger across her nose letting me know she had some party favors that I might need to be in the moment.
Relax.
