Eating gas station trail mix and swallowing my own tears to wash down the salty dryness.

Last night I went to bed with tears falling down my face and this morning I woke up with tears falling down my face. When I try to tap the underlying feeling behind the tears, I cannot quite find it. And I know I do not have to find it, but still I want to make them stop. Or at least subside here and there so I do not feel like my heart has been painted gray and is floundering for footing that never seems to come.

This has all been harder than I though it might be. Being physically diminished and emotionally wounded is like being trapped in some kind of cavern. I can feel the rocks wet and hard and thick around me, but there is no light. I think bats are overhead and pools of water below me, and maybe I want to be swiped by the bats and fall back into the water and sink for a while and then come back up and see some kind of glow over the cave that is holding me captive and have the jagged edges become defined with reason and guidance for what is next.

I keep wondering if I need to make sense out of any of this or come to any kind of conclusive state of mind. For now, I am trying to just be in this unusual, unfamiliar state of mind and heart. I am trying to be okay with being depressed and full of anxiety and grief.

I keep contemplating how there are two wombs involved here. I mean how lucky am I that the first time some sliders of life were sent up my vagina they clicked with my egg and I found myself pregnant? But, please remember that we have been trying with kk for almost two years. And we have been let down over and over and over again. And for just once we had a respite from the negative test.

Oh, and then shock hung over my chest like a murky ocean wave. And I felt sick and hijacked for weeks. And then I started to feel better and then what had been living inside of me was dead. And then its deadness came dropping out of me and sent my hormones raging yet again to a place where I have no control. Or as I have been discovering I’ve been in a place where I let my fear have all the control. And, every time I go pee there is still the reminder of the life that was once in me on the surface of the plush pads that I have been wearing for nearly two weeks.

And while I still am asking the question if sense does need to be made…I have to think that maybe this hard road does have some meaning—meaning with conclusions attached. Like maybe we are not meant to be parents. Maybe we are meant to love one another fiercely and love our community with pure attentiveness and work for justice with all of our might, time, and energy. And maybe I am not really cut out to carry a child in my womb—maybe my strengths rest in other arenas of creating life and giving back to this larger than me life force.

Well, I am still sitting here with the bag of trail mix next to me; the tears tucked up in my eye rims for now; the snow falling more; the day gray and cold; the cave still dark; the glow maybe waiting beneath it all.