The Second Line

It's been quite some time since I've written, I know. Perhaps if my absence crossed your mind, you made some guesses as to its cause. And some of you were probably correct: to our great shock and excitement, after almost eight months, we actually got pregnant. I was pregnant. Was. Past tense.  I recently heard a spoken word poetry performance called "Complainers" by Rudy Francisco. In it he says of all of the small daily complaints we make, "how blessed are we to have tragedies so small they can fit on the tips of our tongues?" I've been thinking about that line a lot as I, someone who is always able to find the words, has not been able to easily talk about our loss. I met with a radiologist recently for more fertility testing, and when he asked me very frankly about what happened to the pregnancy, I found myself forced to say things out loud that I hadn't said once since all of this happened. To my surprise, I was able to form the words for a stran