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Hello Blood: The Dance of Miscarriage
The baby stayed in the desert. I myself stayed in darkness for a long time.
When the small body stopped forming and came out of me, I put it into a yogurt container and drove out to the desert. We placed it on the ground between a saguaro, an ocotillo, and a barrel cactus, and made a circle around the form with small stones. I intentionally left an opening to allow its spirit—if such a thing existed—to get out.
The blood had started at 5 a.m. I went to the bathroom and there it was, just like a period. Just like the end of a sentence. Only it hadn’t been a sentence, it had been a joy, and now, I was pretty certain, it was ending. I crawled back into bed. “I’m bleeding,” I told my partner.
We got pregnant easily, on the second try, in June. By August it was real. At the end of a cross-country drive from Pennsylvania, where we’d been visiting my parents, we took a pregnancy test in a South Dakota motel. We went to Mount Rushmore and looked at the white men’s heads, but all I could think about was the beautiful creature inside me. I already had a name picked out.
In September I went on a six-day backpacking trip in Yosemite with a friend. Because of the nausea, I couldn’t eat much of what we’d packed. But somehow we hiked at high altitudes and lounged aside glacial lakes. On an external hard drive somewhere there exists a digital photograph of me in an alpine meadow wearing shorts and a maroon t-shirt with my hand on my belly. I can still conjure the anticipatory bliss of that moment.
https://www.guernicamag.com/hello-blood-the-dance-of-miscarriage/
When the small body stopped forming and came out of me, I put it into a yogurt container and drove out to the desert. We placed it on the ground between a saguaro, an ocotillo, and a barrel cactus, and made a circle around the form with small stones. I intentionally left an opening to allow its spirit—if such a thing existed—to get out.
The blood had started at 5 a.m. I went to the bathroom and there it was, just like a period. Just like the end of a sentence. Only it hadn’t been a sentence, it had been a joy, and now, I was pretty certain, it was ending. I crawled back into bed. “I’m bleeding,” I told my partner.
We got pregnant easily, on the second try, in June. By August it was real. At the end of a cross-country drive from Pennsylvania, where we’d been visiting my parents, we took a pregnancy test in a South Dakota motel. We went to Mount Rushmore and looked at the white men’s heads, but all I could think about was the beautiful creature inside me. I already had a name picked out.
In September I went on a six-day backpacking trip in Yosemite with a friend. Because of the nausea, I couldn’t eat much of what we’d packed. But somehow we hiked at high altitudes and lounged aside glacial lakes. On an external hard drive somewhere there exists a digital photograph of me in an alpine meadow wearing shorts and a maroon t-shirt with my hand on my belly. I can still conjure the anticipatory bliss of that moment.
https://www.guernicamag.com/hello-blood-the-dance-of-miscarriage/
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