Meeting Mark

I knew Mark loved me on our very first date. He was dutifully eating his salad greens. I was telling some superficial story while attempting to be charming and delightful. He looked at me with those eyes, you know the ones, the piercing stare with look that makes you feel warm and anxious at the very same time. Well, he gave me that look. He was eating his chicken caesar salad, our main courses hadn't even arrived yet, and I knew. This guy loved me.

Now, a man falling in love with me over dinner was not something I was accustomed to. I was the ugly duckling, or at least thought of myself as such. Never very popular or pretty, with glasses and extra pounds, I spent my evening with books, not boyfriends. Oh, I had experienced teenage love and a long term relationship or two, but never anything with a beginning like this.

It was the first blind date I had ever been on. When I say blind, I mean blind. I knew his first name and that was it. I had joined a dating service a few days earlier. Yes, it was pathetic, but I did it. Better pathetic then completely alone, I thought. This was, of course, before the explosion of internet dating sites, so I went to an actual agency, sat down with an actual person, and talked to them about who I was and what I wanted. The next day, they called me with a name, a place, and a time. The date was set.

I say this calmly, but really I was a nervous wreck. I had to take a double dose of Imodium just to get out of my own front door. I put on my favorite jeans and the sleek, black top that made me feel beautiful. I was back in the dating pool, ready to get spit out by tonight's fish early enough to watch the reruns of Who's the Boss.

In reality, it was really a date that almost never happened. It turned out there were two separate entrances to restaurant. Things like that happened, once upon a time, in the day before cell phones. I waited at one door, while he waited at the other. As the minutes ticked away, I was sure he had seen me and left without a word. Then, as if by magic, a tap on the shoulder, a good looking man with kind eyes, and a dinner date that was about to begin.

We chatted in the crowded foyer and even there, in those first few minutes, I felt my inner swan emerging. He was handsome, more so than others I had settled for, but it was his voice that most captivated me. We talked for a long time before we even picked up the menu's. He looked at me intently as I spoke, stared as I finally read the menu. I remember half examining the menu and half noticing the way he looked at me, as if seeing a rainbow for the first time.

I was scared and excited at the same time. The thought that this guy was head over heels for me during dinner, well I almost vomited right there and then. After all, who falls in love on the first date? In the first hour? Certainly, not me. Love takes time and committment, at least that was the message I thought I was supposed to believe. He had to be crazy if he was already giving me that look. But something inexplicable tugged at me. I tried to concentrate as waves of both excitement and naseau crashed over me.

Gossip on the Phone

Did you hear her husband has a girlfriend?
Did you hear that she's only 22?
Do you wonder what the hell he's thinking
When he told his wife that it was through?

Can he say midlife crisis?
That young girl can't see the selfish in his head.
Poor wife alone to tend to all the children
While he lays naked in a bed.

And girl, she cried herself a river.
Sam broke her heart with one quick blow.
I said "Be glad he left you, honey.
Boys like him into men will never grow."

Invitation

I wish I knew what to write
On this blank piece of paper.

Coyly, he invited me in
To play and to say
To do what and be who I wish.
I was intriqued
By all the possibility.

But now, he mocks me.
Laughs as I stare
Giggles as I stumble
Daring me to find words
More eloquent
Than I'll ever be.

Yes, paper,
I will accept your invitation
And though I may not be the most
Charming or witty one at the party,
I'll give it a go,
And I will be there.

To Emily

The baby is dead. I knew it just by the look on his face. The baby is dead. He slowly moved the orb over my wet belly with a look of confusion and pain. The baby is dead. My heart beat slowly and painfully. The baby is dead. The longest 30 seconds of my life ended as I lay on that cold, hard table. Perhaps there was a mistake, he asked. Perhaps I got the dates wrong, but I knew there was no mistake. I had already glued the plastic stick with the two faint, pink lines in your scrapbook. Beneath it, with the pride only a mother can know, I carefully wrote the date and a heart. There was a grave mistake, but it was not in a date.

The words he said were a blur. He spoke and my mind escaped to the thought of the cute yellow sleeper I had already bought you and how very much I wanted to be in my pajamas and hold and feel and smell them. I wanted to look at the tiny yellow feet and imagine yours inside them as I sat in your room, already arranged and ready, but you, nowhere to be seen. Like a sudden clap of thunder, talk of lab work, appointment cards, my mind spinning and an open heart dripping, no pouring, from a place I never even knew was there.

That night, that cold, black, angry night, I sat in the rocker where I once dreamt of rocking your tears away. Pain spilled out like rain, sometimes in downpours and sometimes in a drizzle of tiny, pink pieces. He made phone calls and kept faith. I made your bed with the precision of an expectant bird creating a nest. The clouded fitted sheet, perfectly matching the wall border, the yellow bear at the foot of your bed, I pretended, for a moment, you were there.

Days later, the hospital, it was numb. I, like an oddly shaped bystander, watched and waited. They pointed me to maternity. Maternity? I entered and the sounds of new life pierced into me. Balloons, proud papas, and me. There I stood behind the swollen-bellied woman. There was a mistake. That was supposed to be me… and you. I would never be large with you. I would never hear your sweet coo or cry. I would never be whole again. I never knew the sound of a child, or the silence of one, could cause a hole so deep. Then, as if mailing away a love letter never to be received, the doctor took what was left of you, what was left of me, and without circumstance, without hope, away we flew in two very different directions.

You know, ten years and two kids later, I still hear the painful silence of your cry that never was. It is fitting that only boys were born to me. You are forever my special little angel girl. The other day, your oldest brother asked me to tell him the story of the saddest thing that ever happened to me. I hesitated, shocked and numb as the day you went missing. I sat in the silence of his unanswered question not to think, for your memory sits so close to my surface that I still bleed when I think of you, but to wonder. I knew your brothers would one day know about you, love you in their imaginations as I do, but was now the time? I wanted to shield them from the pain of losing a love so great which only you and I can ever really know. You live deep in my heart, tucked away for safety so deeply that the orb never did see you. Love like ours does not end, like all love, it simply evolves. Ten years and ten thousand tears later, I now know that you really aren't dead. My baby, forever you will live.