Shakespeare made his own weather. There’s a sly reason it thunders over the heath, as the witches discuss Macbeth’s fate—at first a shimmer, and then a dark pool of blood and greed. Emily Bronte knew this trick, too, building storms across the Yorkshire moors for Heathcliff to rage within. Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Homer, Flannery O’Connor—any number of writers have been great creators of the outside air to get the inner weather.
We are all about creating the inside, outside. Today my body
conjures an illness, a kind of witches’ brew in itself, stewed up from my
college students’ various sicknesses, my own stultifying worry, and the
exhaustion that comes under the skin with pregnancy.
Now, it’s as if my own body is a bad writer, clumsily drawing up congestion and headache and achiness and tiredness to stand in place of near-suffocating fear and the soul tremble that facing tomorrow morning will take.
Tomorrow is my first scan—an appointment that has never gone
well for me. The last time I was in that same office I yelled and buckled,
sobbing. At my 6 ½ week scan, the doctor pointed out, and I saw, a pretty
little sac with nothing in it but a full emptiness. By the next morning, it had
collapsed on top of itself and signalled the beginnning of my second miscarriage. This also
happened to be the same week that my father died—three days earlier. It was too
much. So much, that I still carry it with me, and I cannot fathom how it might
come up again if the news is not good. It’s a strange point in your life when
the most outlandish fantasy you can imagine for yourself is hearing a heartbeat
that doubles your own.
But if I can write this story here, to bring its weather in shining place tomorrow, I will. The most blatant blue sky. Only the most perfect breeze. The weather outside entirely allowing a deep, clean breath that my body can take in the bright air. Letting the lungs swell and then loosen. Letting the heart—not just mine, but the tiny other—fill and pulse. Letting that tiny other start its own story, live well in the warm weather of my body, bringing everything I hope for in the whole, wide world, into itself.
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