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It once started with a green light paused on go.

Yes, I thought—how quickly my despondency had turned clairvoyant, like an air balloon suddenly overinflated, hovering too close to revelation. I had outrun the past: judgmental voices, preachers, women reduced to warnings, shadows assigned like inheritance.

And for a brief moment—I had outrun even God.

Or at least, that is how it felt.

As if pregnancy itself had been a strange kind of righteousness, an A+ stamped onto my body by unperished men and moral architectures I never agreed to study. As if I had been graded without knowing the assignment.

Green light.

Go.

Until it wasn’t.

Until go became stop without warning, without ceremony. Until something in my belly shifted—quiet at first, then absolute. Up became down. Light folded in. And I did not get time. No breath. No preparation. No easing into what I had already begun to become.

I had imagined softness there. A glow that would have changed me, made me more myself than I had ever been.

But something else arrived first.

Death—not as event, but as presence.

As silence where anticipation had lived.

And the child—Violet, maybe, something too luminous for language—never fully entered this world. Only the almost of her remained. The weight of what was briefly real enough to change me forever.

And even now, years later, she is not gone from me.

She is with me.

I hear her in pauses I cannot explain. I feel her in the spaces between sentences when I am speaking about anything else and still, somehow, also speaking about her. She does not leave when the topic changes. She simply changes form—becoming atmosphere, becoming weight, becoming the soft insistence that something once began in me and did not complete its arrival.

Death is with me too—not behind me, but beside me. A second presence in ordinary life, arriving quietly in breath, in stillness, in the way I continue around what never left.

Now I notice little girls’ lunchboxes—bright, loud, impossible things. And I soften toward them without meaning to. I watch other children longer than I should. Dresses, crowns, glittering certainty. Something in me reaches, almost prayerfully, toward what was never mine to keep. Not to replace her. Never that. Just to feel the nearness of what was once imagined.

And still, I keep walking through the world that continues anyway, carrying her and death together like twin presences in the same breath—one imagined, one absolute, both living in me in different ways.