Snowbaby

October 20

It snowed the first real snow this afternoon. The record for snowfall on this day is three inches and we’re set to beat it, says the radio host.

At 4 o’clock, I walked outside into flurries. Making my way to the train, I stomped through four-inch drifts on a deserted boulevard sandwiched between the airport and the Mall of America. Usually full of men in suits and women with lanyards, the office park where I work has the feeling of an abandoned old western movie set.

No one is ever on the train platform with me but today there is a woman with a stroller standing under the heater. There’s no child in the carriage, just many bags. She keeps her gloved hands on her face for the whole five minutes we wait for the Blue Line, which confuses me until I try it, too, and find it’s very warm and comforting.

On the twenty-two minute ride home I read the book of essays Emma gave me. The author is critical of her writing practice. She feels suspicious of her need to explain everything, to organize random pieces of life into a logical argument. “Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or to develop them,” she says. I am reading the book to inspire my own nascent chapbook-publishing ambition, so this is devastating news.

—

I’ve recently started experiencing the world almost exclusively in motifs—small images that I interpret as deeply impressed with meaning. My therapist tells me that these moments (where I find myself staring at a red door lit by a lamp, etc.) are my soul speaking. This sounds nice, and also a little goofy. Usually, the vignettes are what prompt me to write. Mitchell recently admitted he encounters life in the same way. I told him this is what makes us poets, though neither of us write poetry.

On the walk from the Franklin Avenue Station to my apartment I pass a park where kids are building snowmen. Parents are standing in a semicircle, chatting with their hands stuffed in vest pockets. I have a sudden desperate desire to join them and take part in the knowing looks and obsessive over-the-shoulder checks on their children. Parents always seem so at ease—and not.

I often think about this radio clip I heard on NPR where a woman with intense bipolar tells the interviewer that no medication could even her out until she had a baby, and somehow that quelled some deep anxiety for her. Having such an obvious sense of purpose would be good for me, too.

—

Tonight I am half-listening to the presidential debate while googling trauma therapy yoga. Specifically, I’m searching “yoga for healing from sexual trauma.” Not because I have a particular experience I need to heal from, but because I want a yoga practice that will focus on my pelvis.

Last month when I tried to get my IUD removed, my physician failed to find the strings and I was left bawling from the shocking discomfort of a specula. What I remember of that appointment are the ceiling tiles I could see above me while I laid down on the table, legs open. Looking at them, I thought about everyone else who had ever looked up at ceiling tiles and what that image meant to them. Later, I wondered if that’s what set me off. I can’t tell if this life of moving images places me more fully in moments, or pulls me out.

I finally decide on a 40-minute session from the Yoga with Adrienne channel. The moderator asks about Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett and the future of Roe. Tomorrow I will go downtown for an ultrasound so they can remove it with a small tube inserted through my cervix.

Lying on my mat after the yoga video ended, I start to visualize all memories of sex that I could conjure. I try to feel myself on my first boyfriend’s bed, on the floor of a cabin with my college girlfriend, in my room last week with a friend turned lover. I wondered whether this would be difficult, if trauma I hadn’t reconciled with might surface, but it doesn’t. What does happen is I feel much closer to earlier versions of myself. Especially to 15-year old Erin who was fingered on top of a bunkbed and liked it but also felt disgust and shame. It’s simple but revelatory to understand/feel that your physical body moved through all your memories at the time when they were present, not past.

—

The Women’s Center has a waiting room with a large window that overlooks the city. At ten on Friday morning, the buildings are blanketed with another dusting of snow. At least it’s beautiful here, I text a friend. The waiting room is full of expectant couples, toddlers. I notice myself harden around them until I recognize the feeling as jealousy. I have a latent fear that I’m sterile and every abnormal thing that happens with my body I assume is a sign of this inevitable tragedy. Maybe this is a common fear, I don’t know. I’m not sure I want a child, but I for sure want the option.

Sometimes I think about how writing is like mothering. Both require attention and care, move slowly with intention, and attempt to direct but ultimately create a thing with life of its own.

Erin West