Just like any other unborn baby, she takes up all my space. She shoves my innards aside.
Here is my bladder, flat as a pancake. I have to get up every two hours to pee. Here is my stomach, compressed to nothing, yet somehow I have to fill it enough for the both of us. I wonder about the location of my liver and and how it's surviving but it must be there. My intestines, too. I have a lot to digest.
My ribs form an upper limit. A boundary of bone. Yet she reaches up out of my torso, feet stretching, searching. She pedals against my brain, blow after blow, driving the revolutions of a wheel that empties my mind of anything. Everything. But her. And the laundry that must get done before she arrives.
My belly is a balloon that will deflate very soon. My mind will contract with it. I know. I've done this before.
But I trust. trust. trust that mine is a well that keeps on filling. A flood of living water saturates the cracks of a space that seems so full
of everything
of nothing
cold and keeping me alive so when the stars line up and the season changes again, I'll still be able to
See
sharply
enough to call a rose a rose
and find my own face in the mirror.
