Mirage

All day I tempt distraction: the bright blue tarp gusting like a cheek full of wind. Leaf shadow on the plastic blue, like the scattered echo at the bottom of a pool. Descending the hill, I crane my neck to keep the view. The tarp is just part of somebody's yard, unloosed at one corner and making me fall in love with it.

At home, I put my head against my dog's chest and listen to her cavernous heart. She thumps her tail softly and we lie like this on the floor, letting the sun describe our faces. Her fur on my face; the after mirage of unnatural blue in the cold spring air.

All of these things, and yet, I feel far away from magic.

After more than four years of trying to conceive, our nonexistent baby has taken on impossibly clear characteristics. She is a she. In a tattered book I keep for her a long list of names, which changes weekly, sometimes Gertrude, sometimes Etym, sometimes Ann. She has a wardrobe erratic in years, from newborn to age five, including vintage items culled from many hours of thrift store searches, and it's hard not to feel how these various outfits will define her personality, along with her name. It's hard not to feel the way I want to lean against the sink with my hands dripping over the dishwater while turning to ask her, crouched on the floor behind, to draw me an abstract sky.

My husband is patient listening to the names. He assures me that after months of strategic lovemaking he still feels what the doctor calls "the passion." As for me, I have come to view my body as a vessel that can either make a baby, or cannot.

To compensate for the absence, I try to love harder all the little details of the world. Naked lecture in the bathroom mirror: how much is already here. When there's so much time in the day it can be chopped into blocks like butter. Differently sized blocks. But sometimes I just sit staring at the butter. Block. Uncertain of how much butter, but a choking sensation, imagining trying to swallow all its cold, broad, slippery body. The butter passes the point of overwhelming. With perfect corners untouched, it stays beneath the glass in its little porcelain coffin.

Does my life sustained by a blue tarp, my dog's heart, equal any great beyond? Bashō would say my question is beside the point, that it has to be the journey before—if—the mountain. And some of the journey is not knowing what will happen. Some of the journey is matching up socks.

Writing about a memory of an object that only means something to me because of a certain way it moved one day in the light, on a day that I needed something to move a certain way in the light. I am tired of thinking about babies and how not to. Instead, I would like to write about the people I once slept with or did not sleep with, and who I continue to love in ways that make me feel an unfathomable amount, and about what happens when death takes away that unfathomable feeling, and therefore, what is real—the compacted, volcanic sensations that last the dash of my life, or all the time and space on either side?

But the present has grown urgent: How long during my dash will I share with my nonexistent baby? At what point before her dash am I?

To my husband I say, "Remember the Day of the Dead when I cried so hard that we could not go to the cemetery to witness the plates of shining food set out for ghosts?" Jaunty music drifted through the neighborhood far into the night. I cried crazily. We didn't even know anyone dead.

Years ago, one of the lovers texted me, "Take your bracelets off, it's dusk." In fact, it was after midnight when I read his message, but tucked inside my memory of that line is every dusk that ever...