Forever

I was youngish. Ready to die. Impulsive. Sporadic. So filled with self-loathing. A deep, deep hatred for myself and anyone who dared to say anything nice about me. Look at me with anything close to kindness in your eyes and I would belch venom. People liked me anyway. Called me friend. Looked out for me. Wore out their knees saying prayers. I pushed and pushed until they went far enough away I didn’t feel threatened by their caring.

And then I met him. Dreadlocked and haunted, broken but pretending to fly. I knew he couldn’t hurt me. I let him in. Unprecedented access. Except my past, my sorrow, my trauma, I hid all of that. It was easy back then. I was so checked out from reality, so far from caring about myself and detached from my inner truths, any sense of grounding, that it hardly hurt at all.

I had to go away for a while. Couldn’t call him until the day I was released. He took a bus to where I was and we stayed in a hotel that night. Made a baby. Not on purpose. I wasn’t allowed to take my birth control where I was and I wasn’t smart enough to insist on protection.

Y’all I was so lost. I was so close to death every day, and I wanted it so badly. Not enough to take an action, but enough to not prevent harmful action and to put myself in danger at every opportunity. Then I figured out I was pregnant. It changed, well, everything.

For the first time in my life, I cared for myself. I cared about what I ate, how much I slept, how I felt. I cared about making amends and building bridges over the skeletons of the burnt. I mentally and physically transformed into a vessel worthy of bringing another human onto this earth. Thank god I had 9 months. That’s not some overnight shit.

This isn’t my birth story, so I’m going to skip all that and get to my first time seeing and holding this little man who took a self-absorbed, nihilistic asshole and turned her heart into more than a muscle that pumps blood. He is the reason I am alive today, he is my everything.

His name is Abacus. And he’s not talking to me right now. He’s 20 at the end of August. And every moment of every day I regret not doing a better job of letting him know that he is my everything, because it feels so lonely, to have everything and then watch it walk out of your life. It feels so empty, but he is my son. I am his mother. And nothing will ever change it. That’s forever.