When you see a Magpie

I can’t run like I used to. I can’t go out on the days I’m knackered anymore. My life objectives of a year ago dissolved into nothing much and I want to clean the kitchen on Saturday mornings and smell bleach on my knuckles and then sit down with strong English breakfast tea. I want my plants to survive and I feel comfort spraying dried leaves, imagining something coming back to life. I’m still thinking about the way my sister’s cat settled down on me and licked my hand two days later. I imagine the smell of Romy when I’m not with her, grubby hands around my neck and there’s a pang of something.


Sometimes unexpected bursts of tears catch me looking out a bus window or halfway through a sentence and I have to psyche myself up to be happy for my friend when I hear she’s pregnant. And it’s not that I’m not happy for her, but it’s also that I can’t be. But I can pretend, for as many years as it takes I can pretend and ask the right questions and be interested in how you feel in the mornings. Because I am interested, it’s just it makes my heart sink at the same time. And the stages of a baby in a sling are hard, once the baby grows out of the sling, I am safe again.


Are you alright with this Annie? Dad says halfway through a French film set in the past with a backstreet abortion. He looks away because you can hear the scraping. Yeah, mine wasn’t like that don’t worry. But you’d probably have to look away. Most people would and most people didn’t sit alone in a bathroom lit with candles studying something that if left alone would have become a human being. The things people said at the time about it being a collection of cells did the opposite of having the desired effect of helping and made it worse. But sometimes I am walking through the woods and I have to stop in my tracks and remember it could have become a human life.


And days and weeks go by and I’m glad I have something to pray to now. Because I do. Light a candle, say a prayer, speak to you from the aeroplane when my body trembles and I imagine certain death but I have you to talk to now. Something that tethers me to the solar system. My friend two beers later on the steps of the pub gives me a look with that in her eye, known, it is the look of being known. Did you have a sense if it was a boy or a girl she said, sorry is that triggering. No - we’re grinning now - she, she was a girl, interesting she says, mine was a boy. So we think of them and the way they didn’t come to being. And yet they came to be.


May was mostly horrible really. The weeks that the online calculator told me you’d be due. May crept up and my body swelled strangely before my period, mimicked another pregnancy and I stood on the cliff in the kind of wind that makes it impossible to hear the person next to you. I’d been picking flowers all morning, wild flowers, my favourite flowers and I said another prayer and the flowers caught the wind and landed somewhere in the sea.


After one glass of wine I urgently tell every new person I meet. I can’t help it, sorry we just met, but it is imperative that you know this happened, it is imperative that you know it was important even though we are watching their first dance and I just met you. I am holding my fifth glass of champagne and this was meant to be a happy occasion, it’s my best dress and I have never been this beautiful, but I can’t go any further without telling you. So I cry on your shoulder and you hold it and I listen to you talk about your girlfriend and your baby due in three weeks and I wish it was me.


I kept the badge my mum gave me the weekend after in my purse, I kept it inside the tiny case and it’s a rainbow and it says after every cloud there’s a rainbow. Something like that. Maybe the wording is different, because there isn’t actually a rainbow after every cloud is there, just sometimes. Rare enough that we’ll gasp and take photos, even if it’s just a slither of one, even if it’s over a miserable looking house. Especially that, because a rainbow in Hackney must be five times the power. So now, every time I get my period I am a bit empty. And every time I pass my ovulation I think of the missed opportunity and a growing anxiety frets about how many there are left. At least if I knew how many I had left.


And I’ll tell you - most of you anyway - of my irrational panic and the days it seeps into being a desperation and I’ll tell you and I’ll make it sound funny. I’ll frame my self awareness so you don’t have to worry, but under the funny relatable way I tell you - well, it isn’t that funny. Sorry just wanted another chance to talk about my abortion my friend texts. Don’t worry me too. And if you’ve been through that kind of dark night of the soul, let me make you a meal and let me squeeze your hand from time to time and say, me too.


It’s just it’s been a whole year, slightly more, and it’s September again and in the stacks of leaves and the colder nights my body remembers walking around like a ghost. Me and my friend can’t tell if it’s worse to go through it alone or with a partner. At least I didn’t have a relationship to take the strain of this and get tangled in my regret. But at least you had someone who held you in the night. The next real person hears at the end of a second date, in the most jarring way possible, I am unfortunately cursed to have to ruin this moment with news of my abortion. Here’s my biggest wound, please don’t hurt me. Something like that. Interesting you think you have to tell someone your trauma to get you to care about them, Annie, Jeri says in therapy. Yeah! Interesting one J! Oh well, hey ho, he came back.


I feel bad but I had to take 10 steps back because you, once my friend who lived like me got everything I realise I want and you don’t seem to realise that everything you say is hurtful. So I start to resent pictures of you and I start to feel like a terrible person. And I’ll try to make a meal or two and show I care and I’ll take longer to reply to texts and cancel sometimes because I can’t bear it. And I think of all the things that surprise me about life, the most surprising is how we can’t relate to each other anymore. And it’s not just me, you also can’t care as much about the seemingly menial details of my life now you have a baby to care for. So it’s better if we just have lunch once a month. So it’s better if we see what’s left of us in a few years. Let the river take us, it’s better, and I’m sorry I just haven’t got over the way I wanted to be the one wearing dungaress.


It’s a shame it brought out the worst in me and it’s a relief it got to the truth in me. And I’d roll my eyes to the back of my head if I heard me saying it, but it’s true that it was the worst and the best thing to happen to me. It’s true that I needed that to know this. A dark haired wild woman reached across to me, one weekend in the fog of it all, she grabbed my arm, thanked me to sharing, said, once you’ve ignited the creative portal of your womb space, it’s hard to close it again. And my eyes would roll if she wasn’t exactly right. Like I know now something about round the back of life, I’ve seen the dark, I’ve seen it and I can’t un-know what it was like to stand so close to life and close to death.


Anyway I am better with dogs now. They come to me and I sit down on the floor and know where to stroke them. And I don’t doubt my ability to help a baby get to sleep. I just learnt it, how to soothe like that, how to be loving and confident enough for them to feel safe. The babies and the dogs I mean. I learnt that way of sitting in my bones a bit better. How to rub a shoulder without worrying I was overstepping your space, how to just know how to touch. I learnt that. And I’m so much better at saying no and I’m so much better at saying what my rates are for yoga classes. I say a number higher than before! I don’t care anymore about pleasing you, and I don’t agree to nights out I don’t want to go to. I keep more space in the week. I keep the hours sacred. I haven’t oversubscribed myself for a year. I don’t go to random exercise classes anymore, I don’t pretend I care to do squats or lift weights. I already know what’s good for me. I’ve had weeks of staying in and cooking more vegetables and I’ve had weeks of chips for dinner three nights in a row. There is something calm about my consumption of wine and I don’t ever pretend I’m a social smoker so that I can go out with the cool kids. On the whole I take longer to text back. I like how I look more than I have ever liked how I look, I like it so much I actually wouldn’t change anything about it. Perhaps just I’d have worn more sun cream in my 20’s. But you know. I don’t care about any of the things I can’t do in yoga and I don’t mind I will never be as fast as running as you would think I am based on how many years I’ve been a runner, or how much I get over taken at swimming. But I’m good enough, I can hold my own in there.


In my last long-term relationship, and somewhere around my mid-20s my boyfriend of the time said he didn’t think of me as a woman. A girl actually. And I made a huge fight of it and probably sulked for a really long time, but now I wouldn’t ask my boyfriend if he thinks of me as a woman because I know that I am. The way my hip can hold Romy, the ledge, that is that is means, to bear a child. My hips sturdy enough to bear a child and my heart big enough to love one. And I don’t think I’d have known if I didn’t have to break it myself. So there. The worst best decision of my life.