unconditionally and forever

The 19th. Today is peaceful. I am writing. I am remembering. I am tending my baby's strawberries. I am sad, but I had my meltdowns earlier this week. Distractedly burned a giant batch of nachos one night, sobbed over pasta and sauteed zucchini the next. Have been by turns irritable, angry, quiet, exhausted. All the usual stuff. All the normal stuff. It doesn't worry me anymore. It's just how it goes.

Kind of nice to get all that out of the way, so today can be quiet. Today can be love. Miss her a lot. So easy to imagine her here with me, as a one year old. On the other hand, it feels like it was never meant to be. Like she never could have been here. That was some other family, in some other universe. Some other life running parallel to mine, and then diverging, and I'm stuck over here, on this side of the tracks, to make the best of it.

If she's anywhere, I hope she's happy. I'm starting let her spirit be separate from my own -- even though I don't know quite what I mean by that, it's just a sense I have. If she was never meant to be here, then she was meant to be someplace else. I don't know where that is. Or what that would look like in metaphysical terms. I will probably never be okay with this separation, but I hope it's worse for me than it is for her. I hope whatever is left of her in the world is okay, and that she knows she's loved unconditionally and forever.

Today doesn't feel like a birthday or even an anniversary. It's our what-if day. I don't know how we'll mark this day going forward. I thought about sending cards again, and I still might, but today it's just me and her and the quiet. If she'd lived, that's what this day might have been like too. So it's okay by me.