To Just Say.

A record that I was here. Better to say it, than nothing at all.

I have written twice and left it in draft form. There is something about this space or this time that makes me want to tell you exactly what it is like. To say it as plainly as possible. But I have spent so many years—a life, really—saying everything in this obtuse poetic way like northern lights for you to make sense of. This feels less than, and yet it is anything but. Even now I see this.

Just today, I see a picture of my daughter on a screen and she has a face. This relieves me and startles me. There is an entire human inside of my human body right now. My son wants to know how big is the universe. It is this big I tell him. Then, at the grocery store, I park too far away and the wheels on the cart lock up as if I am trying to steal it. I have to drag my grocery bag, a 15 lb turkey, my four-year-old son, and this new human inside my human body across the parking lot. A woman offers her help, but I am already in motion and insist I am fine. I am not fine. When we get home, my son paints a family portrait using only blue paint on a canvas. It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Right now there are one hundred things in a day that both break me into shards and then glue me back together. There is something like strength in fragility. Something to learn. You have to be strong enough to come apart.

My husband wants to go away for a night before the baby comes in eight days. I do not know how to say nicely that this is not only absurd but that it makes me feel a deep well of panic in my bones. There is too much to be done. And yet, there is nothing I can seem to do about it.

I suppose what I am afraid of is that I am lacking the ability to see what is important right now, that I am focusing on finishing the wrong things. I don’t know how to make myself better at this, how to make more of the next week, how to get it all done, how to savor my husband and son, how to lay down and be alone, how to how to how to.

This one thing makes me feel calm: it is with great relief and unmeasured joy that I can say I found a literary agent who believes so deeply in my novel that she has offered me representation, and when the new year comes, we will work to sell the book. I have visions, as I have always had, of me seeing it in a bookstore in an airport and crying. Why this is the place I picture myself, I don’t know. It has just always been this way.

All of this, I am saying just so it is said. Soon I will not be right here. Soon I will be someone else. I do not know any other portal in life like bringing life. I am sure we could find or make one or take one, but this is the only one I have ever known. You are one way, and then you are another. I do not know what she is like because I have not met her. There is base nature to get back to.

I feel like I am waiting at the end of a dock for a boat to pick me up, to ferry me to an unknown place. Even still, these words feel less than.

What else can I tell you?

I am so terrified of missing anything with my son. Even now. I think of us today walking along the water and I wonder why I didn’t ask him more questions, sit longer, stay, allow him to cross the street and climb the sand dunes. Will I always feel this way? How can I feel less of it when I am only adding more? How will I be more than I already am? Perhaps that is closer to the red-hot center of my shame—that I simply will not be able to be enough for any of them, and most in particular for myself. Where will she go? I am not ready to board the boat. And yet, it is coming.

I wish I could say this in elliptical and gorgeous ways. But it just needs to be said. That has to be good enough.