1. Turn 32. Watch all your female friends—even those you’d once happily mused with, over coffee or long-distance phone calls, about the glories of child-free living—pair off and start having babies. (Or trying to have babies.) Observe the look they get in their eyes, the watery way they turn toward children in the world—the way your partner, a brand-new love, does, too. A way you never have. Look again, when you see a child next. Look closer. Scrunch your forehead. Get the feeling you’ve been misremembering something since the day you were born yourself.
2. Sleep until 9, wander around the house naked, insert fuck into every sentence you say aloud. Go alone to a matinee on a Thursday and down fistfuls of popcorn slathered in butter—or the palm-oil-based substitute for butter you’ve learned a taste for. Masturbate on the floor in a shaft of sunshine. Observe the tile uncluttered by plastic, pink or blue.
3. Watch, from three thousand miles away in Portland, Oregon, as your father dies in north Florida. He’s been sick for a year, but you’ve been too afraid to fly home—to bring to him, on a silver platter, the virus powering the global pandemic. Observe his withered, bedridden body through the tiny window of your cell phone screen from a helpless distance that numbs and crushes you at once. Call back just before he goes; ask your mother to suspend her phone over the closed-off portal of his face. Sing.
4. Do acid for the first time with your partner, who’s done a lot of acid. Go for a long walk, both of you with your defensive sunglasses, and try not to catch your reflection in the shop windows you pass. As you wander to the park and back—a park you visit almost every day, and which this time you get utterly lost in—happen upon, in order: a) a man whose closed-off scowl makes you sure he knows you’re tripping; b) a man whose over-the-top friendliness makes you sure he knows you’re tripping; c) a seven-piece band, toting world instruments you’re too pedestrian to recognize, setting up in the street just in time for your arrival, which makes you sure the universe knows, too. Stand behind this man you love—a musician, like your father was—as he watches them play. Watch him watching; watch everything else: people silently pouring hope through their eyes at each other over café tables, people strolling aimlessly in the Sunday sunlight. People not seeing you see them. Realize, like thunder, that women made—women make—all of them, all of this. Get home and choose pasta as the easiest meal to cook while on hallucinogens and still fail terribly, somehow. Pick individual bow ties out of the hot vat with your fingers and remember all those nights your mother made pasta for dinner; how your father liked it plain with butter and shitty shaker cheese. Look again at the photo-booth pictures of them, magnet-stuck to your refrigerator. Your age. Younger. When your lover lies out flat on your bed, after you finger the curve where his tiny belly pulls away from its ridge of hip bone, press your whole self against him. Put your hands on your own belly, soft and ample; feel it glowing: the place where you were made to hold new life, the nearness of this man who could give that to you.
5. Watch another school shooting choppily reported, every emerging detail more gruesome than the last. Do not listen to the recorded 911 call wherein a 10-year-old child asked the operator to please send the police now—but do look at their tiny, once-alive faces, splashed again and again across TV screens and social media feeds. Wonder what they ate for breakfast that morning, what nightmares they had the night before, what their favorite songs were. Watch as, after a week or so, they, too, drop out of the news cycle. As nothing changes.
6. When you read—the memoirs and novels stacked on your shelves, the slush pile of the literary magazine you volunteer for—notice all the women writing about motherhood: how wonderful it is, how terrible it is, how they never have time to do the writing they’re obviously still doing. (Maybe doing more of than you.) Hear about high-powered, professional women leaving their careers behind to pursue motherhood full-time. Decide if this is scarier than missing out on the opportunity to show a whole new human the mountains, the ocean; to see the very first time joy blooms across their face.
7. Scroll through Instagram to encounter, between snaps of airplane wings and brunch selfies, more and more photos of pregnant bellies and sausage-legged infants, their tiny overalls not concealing the puff of the diapers they sit on. In a gift shop on your way home from a trip—one of the many trips you and your partner have already taken together, unhurried and spending much of your time naked in bed—purchase a miniscule knitted cap crafted in rainbow colors. It’s for a friend who found out she was pregnant the same day you fell in love, for the child who has grown in warm darkness for exactly as long as your romance has been alive. Soon, she will be in the world, a person with tiny hats and tiny shoes and a name your friend won’t tell you, not yet, not yet.
8. Find yourself daydreaming about what the child you could make together would look like: his sweet dimples and toothy grin, your big cheeks and green irises. The mess of thick, dark hair you both share.
9. When you hold him against your chest; when he takes your breast into his mouth: lean down and sink your nose into his curls. Your teeth.
10. Wait a little longer. A little longer, still.
Such a beautiful piece ❤️
Just beautiful, heatbreaking and hopeful.