Time stubbornly marches onward

Night before last I had a dream that I was hugely pregnant and then the world nearly ended. I said that I had "to fix this" near apocalypse and that I'd have 147 days. Someone else in my dream (my "hero" who would lead me to safety) said we actually would have 149 days because we would be walking into the setting sun and we needed to get moving. We took off walking past the new chasms of the world and through towns filled with death and fearful people.

So I tried to figure out the dream when it came to me this morning as I opened my eyes. When I was hugely pregnant my world nearly ended. As for the 147 or 149 days... I'm not sure. I know that the 147th day of the year is April 25th Gabbie's angelversary--- a fact that I never knew until I was trying to figure out how long 149 days were. 149 days from the day I had my dream figures out to July 20th, an insignificant date.

But now, laying here this morning, the dream of being hugely pregnant and the world nearly ending has made me sad. I've been sad the last few days. And then I realized its the 23. The 25th we found out I lost her. But a pattern keeps emerging that I'm terribly sad on the 21st and the days that follow. What if I really lost her on the 21st? Could it have taken me 4 days to realize? I am horribly self absorbed if so. I despise this trait and am consciously trying to fix it.

In two days she will never be 10 months. My heart is still broken though time stubbornly marches onward. I will take some pictures today for Gabbie Photography and maybe for just a moment time will stop inside the lens and I will feel the beauty of the world as she would have seen it. God, I miss her so.

and yet...

I have been thinking about this entry for a while.  Sometimes my thoughts sit inside my head, sort of rolling around in circles in restlessness, as if they are looking for that just-right-perfect place and time to settle into permanence.

In the last year I have done some things that I would never have guessed possible.  I have reached milestones that I never thought of and caught stars I’ve never seen before.  None of these realizations are on anyone’s list of “things to do” and yet here I am.  I have first been given the news that no mother can truly imagine, and yet I did not stop breathing instantly, though it may have felt like I should.  I woke up the next day, and the next and the next; I have seen many tomorrows from that day that I melted on the floor in front of my baby’s urn at the funeral home.  Like an out-of-body experience, the image haunts me some.  But I have seen them, those tomorrows, and survived each somehow.  I have cried so many tears I am sometimes certain there can be no more, and yet, then again, I reach another milestone: another tear. 

I have reached out to others with losses like mine and comforted when it did not seem I could even comfort myself.  I created a project and seen it brought to fruition; it has become a beautiful tribute to her, and yet, sometimes it tires me to exhaustion to worry about it so, as though I am an inattentive parent caught up in work, and days and hours and life.  

I have taken more pictures in the last few months than I may have in my whole life, and they are beautiful and yet, many of them are, I guess only made-up memories of something that I cannot have, and so I reach for anything that seems solid. Yes they are pictures, but pictures of what? Of butterflies, and pennies, and sunsets and what?  Not her.  Not an angel.  Not a dream, or a memory.  I take pictures for what?  For me?  For her?  For no one? Nothing? Ashes?  I don’t know.  I take them, and I feel them.  I pick up pennies and I think of her.  But she was just a baby, how can she leave me pennies?  How can she give signs?  Why do I want to reach for them and yet wonder how it’s all anything? I wish I had more faith, and yet sometimes I think that I have none.  Sometimes I have none. 

 I have made more new acquaintances in the last year than perhaps in my whole life.  And, though I am glad for each, I wish it had never been. 

            All of these occurrences and yet, yet… maybe I am nothing more than what I was before.  But I am.  I am here.  I am sadder.  I am less.  What have I become if nothing has changed?  On the surface we are still the same family we were before: two girls, two parents, two cats.  We have the same goals, the same dreams.  It is as though she was never here.  And yet,… And yet my heart still hurts.