I’d spent my life waiting for people to reach their place of comfort with my disability so that they’d forget about it and then I could be seen. Of course, I’d succeeded only in erasing a part of myself.

I feel only the constant strain of translation. He could love me but not know me. What was I trying to beat to the punch? What was I evading?

I kept reading the messages on the mommy support group. There was a discussion thread about co-sleeping, which suggested that to reject co-sleeping ensured a child’s sociopathy and to choose co-sleeping caused certain death. I learned a lot about crib brands, mattresses, swaddle cloths, all of which killed children.

home. I imagine myself already there, leaning to kiss the forehead of my sleeping son, collapsing in my own bed, drawing my hand across my husband’s shoulders. But habit and exhaustion limit me.

How horrible, but also how real, how bright, that touch would have been. There was a power in being the object that pulls out people’s worst selves. There’s pleasure in moving away from the hopeful unknown and into cruelty’s indifferent absolute.

They saw absence, lack. But I, having only ever been in my body, did not feel lacking. Going up the stairs feels like going up the stairs. Walking feels like walking. It looks strange, I guess, to those who watch me. It looks lesser. But I had no reason to feel lesser. That would require lessons, for which I had many willing teachers.

I meet reality by trying to either transcend it or sit below its surface. I want the fix, but not the work. I want the world, but not its facts. I do not know how to reconcile opposing desires, to hold them in my mind at the same time. The attempt brings only weakness and I feel myself succumbing to the dismissal of the dissonant mind.

People make spaces I cannot enter, teaching me how forgotten I am, how excluded I am from “real life.”

I was furious with myself for literally birthing into existence a love so strong it could wreck my life.