Who are you
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photo by Alison Scarpulla
Please join us in welcoming a new writer into the Glow cohort today—Ana, whose story of the loss of her baby Nadia we found not long ago: "Perhaps this love is just there, simply felt," she wrote. "My mind will try to build some meaning around her because my feelings take me in that direction, but the idea of a child that almost was is something too elusive to be carefully taken apart and then mentally rebuilt. It’s just a gaping hole, a hollow, aching absence. One I’m told will grow more comfortable over time." —Kate
I love you. Who are you?
Who are you, little girl? Who is this person I am aching for? Did I get to know you? Who were you?
Were you?
Were you ever the child you could have been, had you survived your birth?
There are two of you in my mind. One is the girl you had some chance to be: bedbound, uncommunicative, unable to thrive as you grew. But there is another girl as well. The one you would have been without that single letter randomly altered in your DNA: perfect. All of your potential preserved, ready to unfold.
Which one of you have I abandoned, when I decided to let you die? Is it the same one that I want back?
Without knowing you, how can I know what it is that I miss about you?
What are you?
You are an absence. I am attached to an absence. I can feel it stirring. Your space inside me steadily reshapes itself as it stretches out, seeking for new places to dig its roots in. But what does this space consist of? Is it your absence? What makes it yours? Who are you?
Were you a person?
Not quite a person. What do I miss about you, my little non-person? You were not a mere abstract hope for the future either. And now you are a tangible non-existence. One that draws me in. I want to know your exact shape. To feel my way through your space inside me, to understand its outline, its contents. I want to know all about you.
Can I know you?
Will your space become as familiar to me as I am to myself? Or will you remain unknowable, even once familiar? Forever unknown. Forever unshared. A reality that doesn’t exist. Somewhere wordless, somewhere ancient, somewhere deep. Somewhere mine.
I will carry you forward. That much I know.
Who are you? I love you.