raindrop lamentations

Written Friday, July 20th.

It’s raining and quiet and about 60 degrees of chilly dampness.  It’s 10 am in this camper haven but it’s a ghost town.  No one is about in the misty gray.  Between the raindrops and the bird calls from the not so far off trees I hear a lament.  It’s only for me, a sad sweet lullaby of a baby gone.  I’m trying to ignore it.  I’m trying to enjoy serenity but serenity is only serene when it’s not accompanied by sorrow.  It’s the rain I’m sure.  I say that like I used to say it before her.  It’s not the rain.  The rain is making the world green and beautiful. It is making the flowers grow and the world stretch and breathe after so long a period of dryness.  Drip .  Drip drip… Gabbie…. whispered in my head? On the breeze?… Drip drip drip…. Bird song…. Sigh…. A deep heaving sigh inside my heart.  It’s her.  She is here, and there, and all around. Every drip on the outdoor carpet sounds like a heartbeat.  Maybe you think it’s melodramatic.  Maybe you think it’s in my head, a figment of my imagination, a story I’m telling.  It’s the life I live now.  I wish I had a way to show you but you wouldn’t want to see it.  Not for real.  It’s a terrible movie to watch; it’s Kleenex box emptying, heart twisting, stomach wrenchingly terrible.  But I see beauty: my girls, D’s love for me, the green, the flowers, the butterflies.  The loss is the lens that I see the world through.  I wish it were different.  I wish it were all unicorns, and rainbows, and Gabbie.  But Unicorns aren’t real, and rainbows can’t be touched.  And though the world would miss butterflies, only some will miss Gabbie.  The world will never know her like I knew her, and it’ll never know her like I wish it would, like I wish we, D and I, could.  She would have been amazing.  The angels knew that she would be; she was too beautiful for the world to see. I am glad they thought me worthy to birth an angel, I wish they’d thought me worthy enough to keep her too. But women can only raise angels, they can’t keep them and she was born an angel. The lament continues through the trees, in the rain dripping from the awning, on the cool breeze and in my heart, an aching emptiness in the serenity.