Floating Balloons

When I found out about you, it was like gravity shifted, the stars flipped, and I didn’t breathe air the same way. I kept looking at my hands because they wouldn’t stop shaking, and yet I couldn’t smile. This was all I’ve ever wanted. And yet, I couldn’t smile.

It felt like your mere existence was like God himself creating Earth, a brand new Earth, just for us.   

And when life moves that fast it takes a moment for one’s body and one’s mind to catch up to one another. 

A few days later it settled for me; my shock turned into joy and love. Love so big and so pure and so new that all I could ever think about is you. Who are you? What are you like? Who will you be? What lives have you already lived? How could I be so lucky for you to want me?  I spent hours and hours of day-dreaming about our life together, and the beauty we would share.

And every so often I’d have to pull my heart down from a string, as if it were a balloon that would just playfully float up, up and away. Because this is normal, and everyone who is anyone, has been birthed by another before. And every face out there started just like you. And it’s just another thing that happens to so many people. So, I would try and try to contain myself and remind myself to not allow my wandering and imaginative mind to flutter away and away. 

And sometimes I just thought I would burst at the seams and I’d have to tell someone. It would just whisper out of me. Like, no big deal. Except, I am the luckiest person in the whole wide world because YOU are with me and you picked me. 

I want you to be the fullest. To live and squeeze the juice out of life, every last drop. To do all the things that anyone else can do, and more. To achieve more than I ever will, to be better than me.  

So to hear the news that maybe you wouldn’t…to get the call and hear, “there’s abnormalities”… everything began to shake, balance didn’t exist anymore, the ground was crumbling. Beneath my very feet, ground that was once so stable you could build a whole world on top of it, was splitting and cracking and shaking. But there was nowhere to run for safety. And suddenly you weren’t my safety and I wasn’t yours.

And in the following hours I asked and I pleaded with nurses, doctors, receptionists and God, “Why?!?” “Why did this happen?” “What did I do?” But there are no answers to this question. There are only more questions, and more tests, and more probing and poking and prodding. And then more tests. And more prodding.

I hear murmurs of “it’s not the end of the world” and “there’s a great community for children like this” and “they can still live a long life and have independence” and I want to scream and rip their tongues out and tell them “BUT NOT FOR MY BABY. SHE IS GOING TO SEE THE WORLD. SHE IS GOING TO BE THE WORLD.”

But I don’t know if I’m right. 

This isn’t fair for you. You don’t deserve this. You deserve so much more, you deserve everything. So now I cry and wait. And I can barely move. I hate myself for considering to sacrifice you. I hate myself for considering to keep you. I hate that I don’t know yet and that I can’t protect you. I feel like I failed you and I cannot forgive myself. 

If my life were a book, I feel it would end here with you.

~Rocio Castillo