Mystery

Silhouettes and photographs
Color the lines around the past
All the carnage all the tears
Along the road to getting here

I got in the car. I was sick, exhausted, depressed. My firstborn was in that giant building, that complex, lying in a plastic box, essentially abandoned to nurses and IVs. I couldn't believe it when they said she couldn't go home with me. My doctor even offered to let me stay until she was ready to go home--which would be another two weeks of pitting edema, failing to breastfeed, fevers, and diarrhea. No thanks. The nurse who took my last vitals had me drink ice water before taking my temperature, which brought it down to normal. I packed up my things, discarded any "freebies" the hospital that had given me the infection wanted to send home with me, and walked away.

I felt filthy. Some disgusting nurse had given me and my child an infection that would reverberate through the rest of my life, possibly hers as well. With her dirty fucking fingers inside me.

And I had left the one person who needed me the most behind in a plastic box to cry and lose hope. Do newborns have hope? I thought to myself. I had very little at that point. I could hardly put a thought together in my head. I could hardly walk to the elevator.

I got in the van for the first time in 8 days. Mike pulled out of the hospital parking lot and put on music, whatever was in the CD player from before this fiasco, I mean delivery. Willie Porter's second album was on. Rollin through my mind like a carnival/cotton candy, queen of the fair. I of course promptly and according to prophecy burst into tears.

My mother-in-law drove me to the hospital for the next two weeks, every day to try to bond with Brooklyn. And then I would go home and stand in the shower trying to scrub off the smell of hospital soap.

I didn't let anyone play any other music the whole time. And the mystery of you keeps me holding on. The mysterious part is that three days after I got home, I was well. And three days after Sophia came home, she was breastfeeding, she was bonding, we were on our way. I was traumatized a long time to come, a long time, but she clung to me and it made me love her. This tiny person loves me. I can't be all bad.

You can lose hope. And you can find it again. And the losing and the finding? Makes you want to hold on.