I miscarried at seventeen
and the sentence never learned how to end because even now it keeps going.
would they have your nose or my eyes,
would they be strange and gentle,
would we have been enough for each other…

Or would I still be alone?
would love have finally stayed
because it had a place to land
In the form of 10 small fingers
And 10 small toes.

These aren’t fantasies.
They’re the afterimage of a future
my body briefly believed in.
I bled on a bathroom floor.
That is the whole fact.
No symbolism.
No redemption arc hiding in it.

I went to the doctor alone.
I went home alone.
I learned how quickly a woman becomes
an administrative error
once the pregnancy is gone.
He walked away carrying nothing.
Not memory.
Not consequence.
Not even curiosity.
That imbalance calcified inside me.
Men build lives on clean timelines.
Houses.
Marriages.
White fences sanctifying the women
whose bodies worked.

The rest of us are instructed
to call our losses choices,
or politics,
or punishment.
They say women like me don’t want children.
They say we don’t know how to be women.
They say suffering is what we deserve.
What they don’t see
are the women quietly holding
the smallest echo of a heartbeat,
grieving a life that never got permission
to become visible.

My grief leaks the way my body did then…
not all at once,
not dramatically,
but persistently,
into everything.
I stitched myself together badly.
I kept trying to leave this place.
Blades against wrists, and thighs, and belly.
Anywhere the pain might leak.
But just as I couldn’t make life, I couldn’t take it, so I kept failing at that too.

People prefer survival stories.
“you’ve overcome so much, it’s a miracle”
Lovely courage, the rainbow baby, tied in bow.
I didn’t get one.
So this is not one.

Soon I am turning forty
and my body still remembers
what the world allows you to forget.
My body never wraps itself around another child and gets the luxury of saying, thank God I’ve got mine, while looking away from the blood.

I still bleed.
I still bleed.
I still bleed.
I’ll never be the same,
And he doesn’t care.
He got his elsewhere.

The stigma of miscarriage, especially amongst unmarried women, is a pain that we should never have to carry alone.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years reflecting on what my life would have been if I had been a Mother, my only true dream in life.

I reflect on the way men in politics want to stand at podiums and declare that childless, unmarried women like me should be sent to re-education camps because we have “no value” to society if not dying in childbirth for the pride of men’s egos.

My value to society was lost when grown men r-ped me as a child and broke my body. I still tried to play the role of Mother to keep the love of a man, but my body could not agree.

To the men who sit with folded hands and judge the reproduction of women, this is for you.