The Weight

****************************

There is a weight, and it pulls at me.

Threatens to pull me right down, tripping over my own feet, hands fumbling for something to grab onto to steady myself.

My eyelids are heavy, there is a buzzing in my ears. My skin feels tingly.

The world whips past me, but I look up. I see blue sky, and clouds that are fluffy and white and drifting past so slowly. The leaves on the trees are completely unfurled now, so shadows dapple the world. A bird flies over me.

My heart beats somewhere inside my chest.

I have three living children: two frolicking, hilarous blond-headed beauties, sparklingly alive with joy and curiousity and wisdom, and a small, fuzz-headed baby, so delicously milk smelling, a nuzzling, snuggling creature who lives and breathes for me and with me.

This present is so intoxicating it sometimes keeps me away from my past.

It keeps me in a place where I spew it out like rote, like a script I have memorized and speak for someone else. My baby died. I had another daughter. It was a cord accident.

But then May rolls around, and I start to feel the weeping at the edges of my eyes, and I am haunted by the images of myself holding her, wondering why I didn't keep her deep into the night.

But still the days march past, and I laugh.

And then a pastor writes me a letter and tells me I'm doing this all wrong. And even though I think he's wrong, and even though I know for certain that I am reading much more deeply into his words than he ever intended, it is the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back.

It breaks, and I am suffocated now beneath the weight of seven years of sadness.

It feels like a steamroller, and I reckon it'll roll off of me somewhere around next Tuesday.

Until then, I try to breathe.