No Dice

The cramps were getting too bad, so I finally caved and took a pee test this morning.

Negative. Of course.

I went back to bed.

I cried a little.

If I pointed out to myself that all this meant was that my life, as I know it, as I've worked so hard for it to be, is not going to change, then I felt all right. Nothing was being taken away from me. I have my home, and my job, and my husband, and my dog, and my friends, and all the things that I love to do, like art and music and sailing and all of those wonderful things.

It was only when I thought of you, Succotash, that I cried. Because there is no you. There is no Succotash. You are my imagination. A character I have made up. A void onto which I have projected vague, inchoate hopes and imaginary experiences, none of them tinted by reality - lost sleep, or your mental illness, or your first bout of pneumonia, or your drug addiction, or any of the simple horrors of being alive that lay in store for you, both imaginable to me and not. You are this loose, hazy ideal. Which, even if you had come to be, would not have existed. Because you would have been a person in your own right, with all the flaws and troubles that we all must bear.

It's a fantasy I'm mourning, which is stupid, because my reality - my REALITY, RIGHT NOW - is both terrific and unchanged. I have enough money - that's a real surprise. I have work that I enjoy. I have a husband who I love to distraction, even though it hasn't always been easy, and hasn't always been perfect, and he isn't who I would have imagined I ended up with, but look, there he is, and he knows me better than anyone. My life has assumed contours I only dreamed of in my teens and twenties. And it's happened that way through my own dogged labor. Good fortune too, yes, and I'm grateful for it. But I also busted ass.

So what I am sad for?

A friend asked me if I was doing this ART stuff because I really wanted a child, or if it was just a thing I was supposed to do, and I was annoyed that I wasn't achieving at it. I mean, she had a point. I didn't entirely know the answer. I've certainly been frustrated that I haven't been able to will or achieve my way out of this predicament. My brain has almost always done what I have asked it to do, and I never needed to rely on my body beyond the general requirements of staying functional and alive. Now that I am asking my body to do this unfamiliar thing, and no amount of willing or thinking is making a damned bit of difference, I can admit to being galled.

Behind me, the dog is curled up in a ball of fur in an inviting nest of throw pillows and the mohair blanket I've been carrying around all year. He looks safe and warm and snuggly, and my disappointment changes nothing about him, the pleasure I take from my friendship with this creature, my investment in his well-being, his sincere affection for me.

I am still loved. I am not alone. I do not have cancer. I haven't lost my job. Nothing is different.

Only my fantasy is gone.