She is twenty-four years old and she does not have a child.
The neighbours asked. They always ask. They lean over the fence with their watering cans and their expectations and they say and a baby? as if a baby is something you forgot at the store. As if you left the house without your baby the way you leave the house without your keys. As if the absence of a baby at twenty-four is a clerical error that someone should correct.
she said no. she said she is only twenty-three. they said "sad."
Sad.
Sad like the rain is sad. Sad like an empty crib in a furniture store. Sad like a uterus with no tenant. Sad like a woman who has the audacity to exist without producing a smaller version of herself. Sad like a Tuesday afternoon in a Romanian apartment where the saddest thing that has ever happened in the history of sadness is happening right now, which is that a girl is alive and not pregnant.
She is in bed. Of course she is in bed. Where else would a twenty-four-year-old woman without a child be? She should be in bed. She should be sad in bed. She should be listening to sad music in bed and thinking about all the babies she hasn't had and all the neighbours she has disappointed and all the fences she has walked past without a stroller.
The sadness is so sad. It is the saddest sadness. It is sadder than all other sadnesses combined. Wars are less sad. Famines are less sad. The extinction of the dodo — less sad. A twenty-four-year-old woman without a baby is the pinnacle of human tragedy. Aristotle could not have written a sadder play. Shakespeare would have wept. Dostoyevsky would have put down his pen and said I cannot compete with this level of sadness.
she has a cat though
A cat is not a baby.
she has poems
Poems are not babies.
she has a body that belongs to her and a mind that thinks its own thoughts and a life that she is living on her own terms at twenty-four in a country she chose in an apartment she pays for with stolen cat socks on her feet
None of these are babies.
If she had a baby the space would not be empty. If she had a baby the neighbours would stop asking. If she had a baby she would finally be complete, finally be real, finally be a person in the eyes of the fence-leaning watering-can people who measure a woman's life in offspring the way you measure a tree's life in rings.
But she does not have a baby. She is twenty-four. She has Pilates and poetry and a father who builds websites at 3 AM with robots and an uncle in Latvia who makes goblins eat essays and a grandmother whose apartment has transparent round things floating through it in dreams. She has hot chocolate from Starbucks and magnesium tablets and a sternum that hurts for no reason and a question about why death cannot be creation too.
these are not babies. these are just a life.
Sad.
so so so so so sad