Week 10, Day 1. Sunday. Brooklyn. Baby is the size of a prune, and apparently I am calm now. I don't trust it. I'll take it.
I woke up this morning and didn't reach for my phone.
I want to write that again because it's the first time it's happened in weeks.
I woke up. I didn't reach for my phone. I just lay there. The light was coming through the curtains in that soft Brooklyn way it does on Sundays, and I watched the dust move in it for a while. Jake was still asleep, his face turned toward me, one arm under the pillow.
Last week was a lot. I don't even want to write about what I was spiraling about, because writing it makes it real again, and I don't want it to be real today.
So here's the thing — I think I crossed into Week 10 sometime overnight, and something turned off. The little engine in my chest that keeps revving, the one that wants to know everything right now, today, before lunch — it's quiet.
9:14 AM, the eggs
Jake woke up around nine. He looked at me and said "you slept good." Not a question. He could tell.
I said "yeah, I think I did."
We didn't get out of bed for another forty minutes. He told me about a dream he had where we were on a boat, and I told him I didn't have any dreams, and we both agreed that was probably better.
We made breakfast slowly. He scrambled eggs (I watched, the smell still gets me a little but less than last week, which is something), and I made toast and cut up some strawberries. We ate at the counter, both still in pajamas. He's wearing the t-shirt I gave him for his birthday last year, the one that's getting that hole near the collar.
I should tell him to throw it out.
I won't.
11:00 AM, prune
Somewhere between the eggs and the second cup of decaf, I remembered.
Week 10. The baby is the size of a prune.
A prune.
I laughed out loud and Jake said "what?" and I said "nothing" because I want to keep this one for myself for a minute. Last week it was a raspberry. The week before, a blueberry. Now a prune. It's such a funny word. Prune. I keep saying it in my head like it's the start of a poem.
Hi, prune.
I said it inside, not out loud. Like a secret. I don't know if Prune can hear yet — I know nothing yet, actually, and today that's okay too — but I said it anyway.
2:30 PM, Mom
My mom called at two-thirty. Sundays at two-thirty, like always. Portland time, eleven-thirty for her.
She asked how I was and I said "I'm good, Mom, I'm really good," and there was a pause on the other end. She heard something. She always does.
"You sound different."
"Just rested."
"Nothing exciting."
I lied to my mother today.
We're telling everyone in two weeks — Mom, my sister Sophie, Jake's parents, all of it — and until then, I'm lying to my mom every Sunday. After we hung up I sat on the kitchen floor for a minute. Not sad. Just full of something. The lie is heavy but it's heavy because of what's underneath it, and what's underneath it is good.
Two more Sundays.
I can do two more Sundays.
8:47 PM, the heist movie
Jake and I watched a movie tonight. I genuinely do not remember what it was about. Some kind of heist, I think. There was a car chase.
What I remember is leaning my head on his shoulder around the middle of it, and at one point I thought —
there are three of us in this room.
The two of us on the couch and the prune somewhere in there too, going along for the ride, no idea about the heist movie or the rain that started outside or anything.
Three of us.
I haven't said that out loud yet. I'm not going to. Not until two weeks from now.
But I'm writing it here.
11:30 PM, what I'm choosing today
- To not check the app before bed
- To let the prune just be a prune
- To trust the calm even though I don't know where it came from
- To love Jake's hole-y t-shirt
- To save this Sunday in a drawer somewhere, fold it up small
I don't know where this calm came from. I think Week 9 used everything I had and Week 10 just doesn't have anything left to spend. Or maybe Prune is just a more chill little person than Raspberry was.
Maybe that's a thing.
I don't want this feeling to leave. If I could bottle a Sunday like this, fold it up small, keep it in a drawer for the harder days I know are coming — I would.
For now I'm just going to go to sleep.
Goodnight, prune.
—
See you tomorrow.