Last night seemed surreal.

As I stepped up to the podium to read my words from the piece “Due Date“ in front of a local community of artists, writers, givers, teachers, and fellow human beings, I floated. Months of notice on my work’s inclusion in The 2019 SLCC Community Anthology, Tide, could not prepare me for the half-in-and-half-out-of-my-body-experience. The reading unexpectedly caught me off guard by proving rather difficult. I’ve read and re-read those words many times over. I know them; they are my truth, my heart. I am also somewhat practiced in sharing my truth. So what possibly could be the root of my shakiness?

The moment.

The moment couldn’t be rehearsed or re-read. The moment unlocked parts of sacred emotions stored within me, something I could not anticipate. I could not predict the depths of my truth. Losing a baby is hard. And nothing ever changes it. Not even pregnancy.

Because there I stood, 32 weeks and 1 day along my second pregnancy journey– one year, two weeks, and three days to when I miscarried– where all time encircled me as one. I wandered across a thought revolving the recent Lunar Eclipse and how our bodies parallel the shift with a monumentous karmic purge by means of bodily changes, big emotions, and traumas surfacing in the name of letting go of crowded energies. Peculiar may begin to describe what I felt pregnant, standing among strangers, mourning for a life lost. Guilt’s another good one. Guilty of being pregnant and sad. Sad for the pain endured, not just by me but by all the mommies and daddies out there who’ve felt the same kind of gut-tugging grief. I don’t know one ever moves past it, just through, with a scarlet scar on the other side.

I struggle with the question, “Is this your first?” upon someone taking in my rounded belly.

Today I found the courage to answer authentically, “No it’s not…”

My first angel is somewhere… with yours and hers and his. Our lights of infinite love and compassion. Many people thanked me last night for sharing what I wrote back in July 2018, a time where I believed period bloat overtook me. All along, I was pregnant. These threads of human experiences weave deep.