#sublives

The page has been blank for almost two years. 

That isn’t entirely true. The page has been incomplete for almost two years, the book unfinished, the threads hanging, waiting to be stitched with careful weaving I can’t seem to manage. 

There are reasons, of course. The death of a family member—sudden and irrevocable. I wasn’t prepared. The shock of it hasn’t fully faded, even after fourteen months.

Then there was the first diagnosis, not life-threatening, just enough to startle me with worry. 

Like anyone would do, I realigned myself. I grieved, both my family and my health, and I tried to carve a place in my heart for these feelings to live alongside all the others, a pocket where I could keep them, tucked away so I wouldn’t cry at my desk in the middle of the workday. Tucked away so I could visit them on a random Saturday when the mood felt right, when the clouds shaded the windows and bathed the bedroom in a melancholy blue. This is the only way I knew to keep going, so this is what I did.

And all the while, I tried to keep writing. As friends got agents. As agents sold friends’ books. As books hit best-sellers lists and were optioned and had foreign rights sold. I watched, and I stared at the screen, and I wondered if I needed to build a new pocket in my heart where I could place these feelings of being such a glorious failure. But I didn’t have to. My heart already had. 

Sometimes, when I felt particularly Failure-like, I’d go and sit in the empty room across from our bedroom. I’d bring a notebook with me, thinking I’d use the quiet to write, but no words ever came out. The page and the room were the same. I couldn’t fill them up with anything. 

I wasn’t one of those people who set out wanting a child. In fact, I spent more years than not thinking I’d never have kids. But then my husband began to dream of one, in the quiet, tender way he has, and I did what any loving partner would do: I let myself consider it. It seemed only fair. Things didn’t change for me overnight. It took many months. So gradually I barely noticed it until it was already there. Like a novel, birthed one little sentence at a time, the desire grew word by word, letter by letter, until it was there inside me, fully formed. And that’s when I found out that I couldn’t. It wasn’t impossible, but the chance was so low it might as well have been. I felt robbed. I’m a writer, I wanted to say. I create things from nothing. This is what I do.

But the page is blank and my friends are chasing kids around parks and Instagramming their book deals as they wave their pens across black-and-white contracts and I am here, looking at the page, sitting in the empty room, wondering if endometriosis has eaten all my words alongside my eggs, wondering if the page will still be blank in another two years.