I don’t know where I left off with the last post other than an obvious hiatus. I don’t know what I have mentioned and what I haven’t either here or on my Instagram page. July has been fucking awful. I am back to the emotional point of sobbing every single day. I keep begging and pleading with the future that the anticipation of August and Sylvia’s first birthday will be worse than the actual month and the actual event. It *has* to be. How can anything be worse than where I am at right now. I feel exhausted, emotionally and physically, and daily I think about how much easier to would be to be dead. I am not suicidal, so do not misunderstand, but if I were dead I wouldn’t feel this pain. And being dead is the only release from it. No, I am not suicidal, but I get it…I get why it can feel like the only other option. I understand why people drink, abuse medication and turn to self destructive behaviors. I get it. It would be so much easier to shut off from the world and just float, medically altered, rather than wake up and pretend that I really care all that much about anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. 

I consciously moment to moment have to try to not think about ‘last year at this time’ because it hurts way, way too much. She was alive 365 days ago. Kicking, moving, sucking her thumb maybe, she was a dream, an anticipation, all of our love in one tiny human. If she had been born 365 days ago, she would have lived. I have so many pictures I took of my pregnant self with her and I can not bring myself to look at them. That girl that looks back at me in the picture with the smile that so obviously radiates happiness and hope is gone forever. I don’t even recognize her. I also have videos I took of Sylvia kicking inside my belly. I can’t bring myself to watch those either. The only sign of life I have of her and I am not brave enough to watch them.

Tomorrow August starts and the thought makes me nauseated. We have small, terrifying plans for her birthday. Yesterday I said out loud to Carlos that a small part of me is looking forward to that day and celebrating her. That feeling lasted about an hour and now looking back on it I can’t even believe that I experienced such a thought, much less shared it. Even at that moment the phrase ‘looking forward’ isn’t correctly verbalizing what I was feeling. I think I felt in that hour the strength to be able to present rather than tortured. So it wasn’t that I was ‘looking forward’ to it…its that for a moment I didn’t feel like running.

The weight of my sadness and grief and guilt is consuming and heavy. When I think about long term and the rest of our lives, it seems dark and sad. I know there will be moments of sunshine with Sylvia’s siblings and events and happy moments, but when a child of yours dies, nothing really seems all that hopeful or happy or exciting. I’d love to paint such a rosie picture of a hopeful and eternally positive mind and body but I am simply not that. I think many people would argue that I look anything less than a well functioning working, happy, pregnant woman…but thats simply because opening up the dialog of my head moment to moment is dangerous and reckless. People, I find, tip toe around me enough as it is…I don’t need them to know the dialog of my brain that while I am having a conversation about whatever ridiculous topic I am actually battling a voice that is convincing me that the baby I currently am carrying is dead. The guilt I feel for nearly all of my thoughts related to Sylvia’s death and now our subsequent pregnancy is consuming. I am tortured by the idea that my first thought when they lay Sylvia’s brother in my arms, hopefully alive, will be, ‘It isn’t supposed to be you.’

It is such a terrifyingly uneasy place to live where pain and love live so close together.