Trigger warning, this is about miscarriage and grief.

You can listen to me read this on my YouTube channel.

I grip my head to keep it from spinning off. Loud noises buffet against my ears, incomprehensible as anything singular, but a culmination of ringing, pounding, and screaming. The moment of acceptance must come, but I stand in the reality that was a moment ago and grip my head tighter as though to remove the barrage of new information raming itself against me, forcing itself into my mind and heart like an inky black ice pick. My throat refuses to move the liquid forming in my sinuses down, and nearly prevents air to move as well. I must inhale, a ragged gasp that allows the cruel ice to rip down my throat and fill my lungs with searing cold. Loud. So loud the pounding, but my hands are shaking now and losing their grip on my ears.

There are words forming in that chaos ramming itself against me.

My knees send signals momentarily louder than the ruckus that enter my brain as a normal sensation it is willing to accept. Pain at the sudden impact on the ground. More pain signals slice through the noise from my palms this time; thrown out in pure self-conscious protection of my nose before it, too, met the ground. Is the ground trembling now with the weight of these words?

Some animal instinct in me begs my body for more air and I begin to add my own ragged noise to the density around me. My lungs, nearly frozen through, protest bringing in anything more from the outside, but I am betrayed by that instinct, and more air cuts and drags itself down my swollen throat to pound through my body. I convulse and wretch, my stomach having now begun to protest any digestion of the chaos.

When will it end? I cannot take anymore. I will not.

But my guard is weakening. The shrieks of splintering ice cracking and ramming, slashing and searing as it finds its way into me are louder and louder as its shards cut into me, down me, over and over until I am shivering uncontrollably from the lack of warmth around and inside me. Until the pitch of its darkness has spread so thoroughly and completely my mind is of blackness and I cannot comprehend anything but the words that are now so clear, so concise in contrast to the maelstrom around me. Each repetition a heavy layer of unfeeling cold seeking to suffocate any remaining warmth from my body. I can now only lay in weak submission as the words pierce my existence.

“There is no heartbeat.”

This is a writing response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. “In a paragraph or so, describe an action, or a person feeling strong emotion – joy, fear, grief. Try to make the rhythm and movement of the sentences embody or represent the physical reality you’re writing about.” (pg 9)

I chose to write about how engulfed my body was by the initial disbelief of my miscarriage.