It’s been a while since I wrote, which I have guilt about. Though I have a million blog prompts in my head, getting them out and written down seems to be overwhelming. We are coming up on Sylvia’s 8 month birthday. It is so unbelievable to me that its been that long since she died. Realistically, when I look back at the past 8 month I can’t even hardly tell you what I have done with my time. My house looks the same, all of her things in their exact location that they have stayed since I was pregnant and since she died, my job is the same, though more exhausting it seems, my relationships with friends are about the same, though she have shifted, and thats okay, my marriage is the same, thankfully and my head…well, thats constantly moving. My ‘hard days’ that I can’t get off the couch are fewer but it isn’t because I hurt any less. I find myself more and more sad that I can’t envision what our life would be like with her here simply because I have nothing to compare it to. Often even, it seems like Sylvia and her life and death were some strange dream that never even happened…like its some make believe situation, a story you repeat to yourself so much that you start to believe its true. I see the pictures of her, I see her urn, I see her blanket, I have memories of my pregnant belly…but still it seems sometimes like it just never happened. A million things about the past 8 months make me very, very sad and feel very, very guilty but this is probably the worst. I suppose some psychoanalytical explanation would be that my mind is trying to protect itself, but in regards to the only memories I have of my only child, I need my brain to back off. I need those memories to feel real, I need to remember the weight of her in my arms, I need to remember how it felt to kiss her head, I need to be able to visualize her toes and fingers and nose and chin and hair. I need these details because its all I have. For her and those moments to feel sometimes like they never happened at all is so painful and makes me feel so terrible and guilty. I didn’t have control over what happened and the unexplained reason to why she died and now I don’t seem to have control over bringing back memories and making them seem like they even happened at all.

Time is a really weird thing. It keeps going by no matter what you’re doing. Though its constant, I couldn’t name a single thing that seems more varied. This month, in particular, has felt very long but this 8 months has felt very fast. When I think of Sylvia’s upcoming first birthday I find it hard to breathe. I know it will be here faster than I want and I have already started to think about how we want to celebrate it. August is so beautiful here, hot, but beautiful. The sun is out and long, evenings are warm, sunsets are beautiful, grass is green, flowers and orchards are still beautiful…its the month Carlos and I got married. The top of our wedding cake is still in our freezer because last year, when we should have eaten it for our first anniversary, Sylvia had died two and a half weeks prior. Celebrating an anniversary by eating a year old cake felt cruel. That cake was made when we were different people. The only detail I have absolutely decided about Sylvia’s first birthday is that we will have a little version of our wedding cake made for her, decorated with succulents, just as ours was, and something purple.