Usual disclaimers apply. One-shot.
Ryan's thoughts on losing the baby. Just assume it was a girl and that it was his.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
Close To Heaven
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
A child without parents is called an orphan. A wife who buries her husband is called a widow; a husband who is left behind by his wife is called a widower. But what do you call the parents of a dead child?
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that I had lost my child. Or better yet, when I was brave enough to admit to myself that I knew. Because this kind of knowledge you don't instantly recognize. You may know it in your heart but you don't want that certainty – kind of like with a letter that you don't dare to open, too afraid of what it might contain.
Because knowing would make it all too real.
Talk about ironic, because uncertainty is what has kept me going – since that's what my life had become: a string of undefined moments wrapped up in the uncertainty of my own life. I never knew what was to come or how to prepare for it. Just knew that I had to be ready for when the moment arrived.
And now, I embrace that uncertainty. Hold on to it. Hold it close to my heart.
It's strange, because, I was excited, happy even and looking forward to my child. I was ready to redeem the mistakes my own mother made. And, with one breath, one blink of an eye, my life was turned upside down, yet again.
That instant I realized that happiness was something you only give a name to when you can't find it anymore.
With every day that passes, I distance myself from her and with every single step I take, the promise of her future keeps slipping away. To go on means to move further and further away from her.
I try to fight the days but the days don't care. The world keeps spinning and I'm stuck in it.
Still, I'm losing myself in the future that belongs to the past now, where so many opportunities have been left untouched.
The Cohens try to help. Seth rambling on about nothing and everything all at once. Sandy giving me fatherly advice and Kirsten giving me sad, knowing glances.
Sometimes, the quiet drowns out my own thoughts, because it's a wrong kind of quiet. When you hear nothing and still have to shout over the silence.
And, in my dreams there are whispers of a voice and glimpses of a face that I've never heard nor seen. And never will. With flashes of light trying to catch her hair but the small head stays in the dark. She giggles when I tickle her and calls me "daddy".
The dreams come and go. I wish I had a switch to turn them off, because I know where she's never been she is going to stay forever.
And I'm stuck here.