Time traveling

Time is so weird, ever since, that sometimes I try desperately to nail down the timeline. For example, a month or so after we found out about the miscarriage — was it a month? — my partner had an unexpected work trip, so my mother boarded an Amtrak to stay with me while he was gone. She already had the ticket, actually – she’d bought one for that weekend because my friends from our mutual aid collective were throwing a joint birthday celebration for me and a buddy in the park. In fact, it had crossed my mind, originally, that this birthday party might be the right time to finally tell people about the pregnancy. I had imagined it a million times – standing in the park with everyone who’d taught me about love and community the past few years, my mom and C next to me, sharing the happiest news I could imagine. I had seen it so clearly – it would have been in Malcolm X Park, one of my favorite places in DC, and we would have had those shitty plastic folding tables from the church, and someone would have made vegan cookies that were surprisingly delicious, and winter would be over, and our new life would start. 

Instead, I picked my mother up from Union Station in the dark and took her back to our apartment in a cab. The cherry blossoms were supposed to be in peak bloom that week but we couldn’t really find any, even when we went to the arboretum. We missed it, I guess. One morning I woke up and my mom was sitting in my armchair, the same one where I sit and think in the mornings. She was holding a stuffed animal she’d found somewhere in the apartment, and petting it tenderly on the head, and crying. 

The mutual aid picnic in the park still happened, actually. When we’d found out about the miscarriage, I’d texted my friend the news and told him they should go ahead and have the party without me, that I wouldn’t be around for a while. They ended up postponing the whole thing until 3 weeks later. So I went.

At first, I told myself I would just show up to drop off some tongs for the grill. Once I put the tongs down on the table and survived the first reunion hug, I thought, I’ll hang around a little while longer. I might’ve made it an hour, maybe more. Everyone was sitting around the shitty plastic tables from the church. Someone had made vegan cookies. There was a bounce house and kids were playing in it. It was a very nice party. It was exactly the party, in fact, that I had pictured. It was the party where I was supposed to tell my friends that I was having a baby.

It was the very beginning of my lessons in the physics of grief, and how it warps time. People love to talk about how grief isn’t linear, and that’s certainly true. Maybe you could say it makes time unpredictable, or like a house of mirrors – some days you’re living your real life, other days you are back there again, back at the worst day. Maybe you could say it splits time into parallel tracks, so every milestone has an echo – This is when we should have been driving to the hospital. This is when we should have had a newborn. I began to understand how the echo could drive a person crazy.

Months later, on the day that was supposed to be the due date, we both took off work. We went to a museum and saw the Yayoi Kusama exhibition, where you go into mirrored rooms two at a time. The attendant closes the door behind you and everything explodes into color, all around your feet and stretching out ahead of you. The mirrors make a field that never ends, you and the weird shapes repeating and repeating.

For no real reason—maybe because I wanted to go swimming—we stayed in a hotel that night. The indoor pool opened at 6, so I padded down there with a towel, and discovered it was essentially a conference room with a pool in the floor, the florescent lights flickering and Ed Sheeran songs playing over a tinny loudspeaker. I was the only one there and the water was freezing, but I paddled back and forth, scraping my toes on the shallow bottom, burying my head underwater and staring at the pool lights. 

The next morning we woke up and decided to get a dog. We drove to a little fair outside a pet store, but the dogs were hyperactive and huge, so we drove to a pound, and one at a time took the dogs into the little yard behind it, sitting on a bench and waiting to see if we felt anything. One was a little black dog who barely looked at us. Another was a pit-like creature who seemed stretched out and world-weary, distracted. “You can always come back,” the attendant told us. “We have new dogs all the time.” This seemed sensible. It was time to go home. But we stepped out the front door and I felt suddenly like I had to sit down. It was time to go home and we were going to walk through our apartment door empty-handed. We were going home alone, after all. 

I had expected to be a wreck on the due date. I’d even been proud of myself for planning ahead, for taking the day off and doing something to distract ourselves. I didn’t know yet that grief never adheres to predictable timelines. I didn’t know that for weeks after the due date I would be wracked with new waves of grief more intense than anything I’d yet experienced. I discovered a new level of hopelessness – what if things didn’t get better with time, at all? What if they would only get worse? In so many ways, these days were even harder to survive than the acute grief I’d felt in the first few weeks. 

But these were also the days that cracked me open enough to remember the people in my life who had been living with grief for much longer than me — some of whom have been grieving a loss as long as I’ve known them. I began to revisit my memories of these loved ones with a new appreciation for what had been pulsing underneath their daily lives all this time, for what they had been dealing with that I couldn’t have understood, back then. They were proof that somehow, despite it all, life goes on. That grief stays with you, always, but that you can keep walking with it by your side. 

Grief makes us time travelers. We move through our days in one direction, knowing that at any moment we might get yanked back in time. We might turn and see the imaginary lives we could have lived, before the loss, running just beside us, close enough to touch. We might think we’ve finally put some distance between ourselves and our grief, only to wake up gasping, unsure what shore we’ve washed up on.

I have not found any way to get used to this. I’ve only come to see that I’m not the only time traveler, that the more I speak about what’s happening to me, the more my eyes are opened to the others who have felt the same thing. That sometimes, when I say it, an echo comes back and finds me in the dark: the same thing happened to me.