the scarlet m

I'm not supposed to talk about it.

In fact, I've learned that I'm not supposed to want to, either.

But it happened. It's part of my narrative now; a metaphorical scar that most people will never see, but that I will run my hand over each day just to see if it's still there. And maybe someday, it won't make my stomach lurch.

Maybe one day, the incessant hum in the back of my head will stop. The one that makes sure I never stop thinking about it, not even for a second. The gentle vibration of my cyclical thoughts about what I could have done, whether it will happen again, what we did to deserve this.

They say it's no one's fault, that it's extremely common.

If it's so common, so much so that the doctors barely batted an eye as I laid in the hospital bed, why wasn't I prepared? "Why didn't anyone tell me?" I scream to myself in too-hot showers when I'm alone and no one can hear me. Everything about it: the pain, the gore, the heartbreak, the loss... all of it could have been so much easier had anyone told me there was a 1 in 4 chance, that the fact I'm young and healthy didn't mean shit, that a tiny, beating heart didn't mean I was safe.

No one is safe, and yet nobody told me this.

8 weeks is long enough to fall in love with anyone. Even a tiny, 1/2 inch jumble of cells.

I ran into someone who I hadn't seen in a few months, and when he looked at me he said, "honey, you look different, your face seems so mature," and though I joked that he was simply calling me old, I knew what he meant, but I couldn't tell him that. I wanted to, I wanted to say, "it's loss, my friend, I'm not the same." I wanted to tell him that I see what he's seeing when I look in the mirror, like a light's gone out somewhere behind my eyes.

But I'm not supposed to say anything because it makes people uncomfortable. So I said nothing.

I've been doing a lot of saying nothing lately. To stay strong for my husband. To protect the ones who do not know. To allow the people who do to forget that it happened and move on.

After all, it is my cross to bear. It is my body that failed, my body that took something it spent nearly 8 weeks growing and threw it away like garbage. It is my body that managed to grow a flicker of a heartbeat just to give up.

And I don't want to carry this shame around anymore; it's heavy and putrid and embarrassing. But I am ashamed. And though I know many women who are carrying this same scarlet letter M, I know hundreds more who don't and never will, and they're the ones I think about when I'm lying awake at night. I think about their joyous Facebook posts, their cute little bellies, their gender reveal parties, knowing I'll never have that gleeful naivety ever again.

I lie awake wondering what criteria the universe uses to decide who will gain and who will lose. Some nights, I take comfort in science, telling myself that I was attempting a very delicate and fragile process that is actually quite difficult to achieve. Other nights, I make laundry lists in my head of the things I've done wrong in my 27 years, wondering which one was the reason I didn't deserve the dream I'd started building. And each night, I conclude the same thing: I might never understand why, but I know it's not fair.

And it won't ever be. Whether I believe it was a random accident, or that this was a necessary path in my journey, it's still a permanent scar, painful but beautiful in the right light, to the right people.