New Life, Old Me

 Hello from my teenage bedroom.  I am here alone, except for my cat, Goose.  Goose, who won't get an inch away from me, and thank God for that tonight.   My babies are with their dad.  My babies are with their dad and I am not with their dad in all of the ways that you can imagine that statement to exist.  So, I am under a patchwork constellation of glow in the dark stars that I pasted to my ceiling when I was 14.  Before I knew what a manic-pixie-dream-girl was.  Before I wanted to be one.  Before I tried to become one, which was before I decided that a steady family life might actually be ok, which was before I landed here, in my teenage bedroom, under these glow in the dark stars, alone.  

Things end.  Good things.  Real things.  Things you thought you would never forget the shape of become soft and rounded in their edges until they come to have no edges at all.  And you are left wondering if faded is kinder than sharp, and you are unsure. 

Most nights, I will have my babies.  I will yawn through 5am after having been up at various hours for various reasons and I will make breakfast for two of us, and for three when the bottles run their last round.  But only three.  It will always stop at three.   Five nights a week, my girls and I will sing in the kitchen and battle through bath time and bedtime, just us.  Five nights a week, I get to be the mom I want to be without the ankle weights.  Five nights a week, I will do my best to pretend that everything has gone according to plan. Most nights, he will not have his babies.  I am not sure what his 5ams will look like.  That is no longer mine to know.   But I don't breathe very well without him, and it's difficult to tell if that is because he is oxygen or if it is just because his lungs are so tangled into my own that the removal of one set from the other is life threatening.  I suppose you can't know the answer until you try to separate.  I suppose the answer is not love, but a desperate grab for breath. 

I have no idea how to do this.  I have plenty of practice leaving things I knew to be temporary, but this is the first time in my life that something was supposed to be permanent and, actually, was not.  I don't know how to be a single mom.  I can't scream loud enough with my inside voice to expel the acid of being left like this.  Even the catharsis of writing it down is hot like a campfire ember, burning my fingers as they fly across the keyboard, searing the skin of them any time I stop to feel.  

So, here I am. Under these stars.  Staring at an empty bedside bassinet, and sleeping with the teddy bear that my toddler left behind.  I moved things from one home to another this afternoon.  I drove southbound on the highway alone.  Trunk full of boxes, car full of breakup songs.  

New life.  Old me.  Time to find my own breath.