Streaks

Purple. Orange. Pink.  The sky is streaked with beauty on this cool, crisp morning.  My cheeks are streaked with tears.  My insides are a pressure cooker.  The pain builds and churns and presses until it leaks from my eyes.  I feel as if this thing inside me will explode.  I cannot bear it.  Wails begin to escape from my lips, and I can no longer act civilized.  I cannot contain the thoughts pounding through my mind.  They pour in a rushing a torrent from my lips.  I do not care that people can hear.

"I miss my baby!  I've never been apart from her for 4 long weeks before.  How can I live without her?  I do not want to learn.  I do not want to put time between the intersection of her life and mine.  I do not want to be ok.  I do not want to forget.  I do not want to do this!!  How can this be my life?  How can it have gone so wrong?  It was not supposed to be this way.   I can hear her sweet voice in the bathtub asking, "What color will you paint me today, Mommy?"  I will never get to "paint" her with soap again... to imagine with her.  I cannot do 'This Little Piggy Went to Market' while I clean her little toes ever again."

I pound the bed and pull my hair.  Agony.  Breathing fast now.  The wails will not stop.  I sit up to calm down, but my arms hang limp and empty.  No one for them to hold.  Another wave hits, and in my heart I feel like the living dead.  I am sorry for my babies.  They can hear now.  Instead of songs and laughter I am afraid the only sound they will know is sobbing.  Worse.  They will not know their sister.