I want everything to do with you.

[shoelace009.livejournal.com]

You came to say goodbye to me. We were both going home for a week but it felt like it would be a year. Though I wasn't one for the melodrama, I started to miss you before you even came to say goodbye.

We talked. You teased me about how I wasn't allowed to go out when I went home. I dismissed it. I made some joke about how if I ever had to make a choice about anything, I would choose me. I turned around to look at my desk for something. Standing by my door, you abruptly grabbed me back the hood of my sweatshirt and pulled me back to you. Kind of like they do in the movies but there was no forceful, longawaited kiss with it, no admonition of love. You wrapped your arms around me like you have a thousand times and told me how you'd miss me. I sat there in that familiar place with my forehead pressed against the little curve between your neck and your shoulder, my little curve, the place that gave me the comfort of home though every time felt like the first.

You left and I let you go, debating with myself over whether I was feeling that familiar rush or reluctance to see you leave. I watched you walk away because that is what I do. I never stop you when I can because I know I really shouldn't despite that fact that something begs me to anyway.I shut my door and put fingers on my forehead, dragging them down my face. Romantic as it really isn't, you grabbed me by the strings of that organ so often associated with love, that organ we won't mention lest this turn into a chick-lit sort of vignette- nevertheless, you got a hold of it just by touching my hoodie and pulling me backwards, back into a feeling I've been trying to drag myself out of.

You're my best friend. I would walk through fire for you- and that's one of the only times I have ever meant a phrase like that when I have sworn it. But I would. I want to teach you everything I can and I want to make you a better person because it's a far more noble goal than bettering myself. You're my best friend and I would stand beside you through everything. You've never done me any wrong except for making it so that I won't be able to leave you even when you no longer need me.

Somewhere along the line somebody told you to make yourself indispensable to somebody and you listened.

Dollbaby.

[shoelace009.livejournal.com]

I remember the first time I held her, the day I became an Aunt. She had my brother's jet black hair, our jet black hair. Don't quote me on this but I think all babies with brown hair come out that way, some postnatal tradition or something.

I'd always thought newborns looked alike and I guess I felt that way then, minus the fact that her nose was cute. I liked it. It looked kind of like mine but fit for a baby, the way it should be but you have to understand I wasn't used to this sort of thing. It had been a long night and I'd slept on the floor of my brother's girlfriend's room, waiting for the time to come. Everybody else had passed out and I felt obligated to stay up and attend to her.

The baby had been born, so to speak, while mom and I were away getting lunch. I remember it being a stuffy lunch, one of those that has little taste but has no necessity either and is more for the disposal of time. Feeling the need to get back and the desire to stay away, we ate in the car. By the time we had arrived back at the hospital we were grandmother and aunt, changed in our titles perhaps but little else was different. There was nothing incredibly shocking or new to this, not like we had been expecting.

We took turns holding her and I took mine, well aware of the sensation that told me this first time would be the last, the self-preservation the moment had of itself. She was light in my arms and still, like a rock swaddled in pink cloth. Her head was tiny and her black lashes long. She was silent, like a mime almost. She didn't cry or rattle the room with high-pitched screams. She just lay there, like a rock that could sink peacefully to the edge of the ocean. No fussing. No moving. A dollbaby that I might have lay abandoned on the floor ten years ago.

Sitting on the edge of my seat, I looked up at her mother, laying in the bed. Her eyes were shot and her cheeks softened by tears. I got up and handed her the baby. The stillborn baby. The dollbaby. There are just some things even nine months of pregnancy won't prepare you for.