This time I listen.Not perfectly, but more than before.
“Also,” she adds, glancing at her notes again, “since you’re not sure about the pregnancy, we should talk about options.Prenatal care, adoption, termination—whatever you decide, we’ll support you.There’s no rush today.”
No rush.
She says it like my life isn’t already sprinting ahead of me, like I can still choose the pace.Like there isn’t a countdown humming under my skin.
I nod anyway.Because nodding is what I do when I’m trying not to fall apart in public.
I walk out of the clinic with a folder in my hand.Pamphlets, referrals.A bunch of instructions that might help hold together a person like me.
Outside, Portland is doing its soft, gray thing.A drizzle that doesn’t commit.It kisses your hair and your eyelashes and your sleeves until you look damp and defeated, but not enough to justify an umbrella.It’s petty rain.Passive-aggressive weather.
People stream past me like nothing has happened.A guy laughs into his phone.A woman hustles a stroller over a curb.Someone’s coffee lid pops off, and they curse like it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.
But the city doesn’t care.
So I make it to a bench—somewhere between the clinic and the street—and I sit.Like sitting is going to keep my knees from giving out.Like the ground can hold me up when my insides don’t feel like mine.
I drop my face into my hands.
And I breathe.
Not a cleansing breathin and air out, because apparently my body is committed to survival even while my brain is busy writing a eulogy for my old life.
A baby.
An actual human being.
Something with bones and a heartbeat and a future that will depend on me—me—for everything.
I press my palms harder into my eyes until I see spots.
This is impossible.
Because what kind of mother would I even be?
My life is motion.My life is passports, batteries, and boarding passes.My life is airports at dawn and hotel rooms at midnight and editing footage with bloodshot eyes while I tell myself sleep is optional if the story is worth it.
I chose this life.
I love this life.
And now my body is asking me to build a whole new one inside it.
A baby doesn’t fit into a suitcase.
A baby doesn’t care about a press pass or an itinerary or whether the light is good at golden hour.A baby needs you there.
And I don’t know how to be there.
The city hums around me—tires hissing on wet pavement, umbrellas flicking open, voices blending into that background noise that usually makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger.
Right now, it makes me feel untethered.Like I’m floating in the middle of a crowd and nobody can see I’m drowning.
My mind does what it always does when I’m scared: it makes lists.
Dad.His face when he finds out.The way he’ll try to be strong and accidentally make it worse.The way he’ll blame himself, because he blames himself for everything—Mom dying, the camp falling apart, us growing up too fast.
