A possibility of a person.

I found blood two hours after I’d first put pen to paper and changed weeks into words on a page. For two weeks I hadn’t dared, just in case. I jotted down quick notes: week four, I’m pregnant and grandad dies; week five, frenzied, trying to sort everything out; week six, tired and short-tempered. I think that when nap time comes around maybe I’ll write it all out so far, a record of pregnancy. Perhaps I’ll share it when I announce, I think, I’d already imagined a pregnancy announcement in my head. Already begun to book a doula, applied for the birth unit, bought two books.

And then there was a bit of blood. And speed limits broken as Toby rushed back from work. And hospital.

It’s Wednesday.

Maybe there’s no life when before there was.

Maybe, right now, I’m feeling guilt at hating the birth that brought my child into the world, with vitriolic poison I’m directing at my scar, as it potentially taints the pregnancy that I now cannot imagine my life without.

I’m laying here with hospital band on wrist, a cannula in my arm; cramping, cramping, cramping. Holding onto the maybe, the doubt and the uncertainty, the slim possibilities. I want this baby. I hide under the covers when Toby goes to the toilet and whisper to it, voice cracked and thick. “Stay.”

It was because I cut the first sunflower, the one that was blooming along with me. The one that finally unfurled on the day that I held a pink stick in my hands and watched two lines appear.

The machine blips make me flinch, a remembrance of a past life, of the time before, red cords wrenched and red screaming life that I didn’t get to hear.

They come in, ask questions and leave. I sometimes feel like I’m taking a test that I feel like I’m failing, an oral exam which I don’t have the right answers for. “Did they take a blood test?” translates in my ears as are you’re sure you’re pregnant? but as the day unfolds they begin to look with concern, and then worry and then kind voices as they explain with kind eyes that actually, probably, there might not be or there shouldn’t be in the space where I hold the dream of small hands and fingers and suckling. I feel oddly vindicated for a second, a brief flash that feels like triumph, before oh no. It’s not going to be this time.

My hormone levels are dropping, I’m bleeding and I’m cramping. I’m told that there’s small life clinging onto where it should not, attached to the place where my daughter emerged.

It’s not just this loss that I mourn, but also that between Eilish and I. The closeness that slowly faded with the beginning of this new stage, like a breastfeeding baton passed between toddler and baby, and all the grief and the sadness at saying goodbye to that before we were both ready feels now even emptier than before.

It was real, it is real. At six weeks it is real. A possibility of a person.