A nervous twitch now a regular facial fixture—
my eyelid flinches, its knees buckling
under the pressure of it all. I close my eye
and place the pad of my forefinger over the lid
like feeling for a baby kicking but of course
it stops doing it then. I decide I am too artistic
because I can’t think about the past without
drawing comparisons and so I close my
twitching eye to make the sketching even more
difficult but then voices form in the dark. I can
hear my younger self telling friends her favourite
baby names, then, years later disagreeing with
her partner about baby names. Conversations that
were never going to matter but we didn’t know. You
have choices until you don’t. You have choices until
you’ve left it too late. The hollow of my hip aches
with the absence of a tiny human wrapping
their chubby legs around me as I show them off,
carrying them from room to room. I am a series
of problems that need to be fixed before anything
else and I know this. But my eye continues to twitch.
