Could Have Been

**To honor a friend who lost her baby this week and to wonder about my child who would be three and a half today.

Blood dripping down my leg, pools in a shallow stillness on the floor. A clump of cells the doctor said, clinical, unfeeling. My contracting muscles beat a sorrowful dirge as this life leaks onto dusty linoleum. Twenty-one days to make a heartbeat, to fuel a soul they say. Twenty-one days to build the dream of tiny fingers reaching out in love. And now the dream drains away, the red starkness the martyring of a life…..onto the tear-stained floor. Its okay, they say, you have other children; you can try again some day. But who is it, I wonder, that is leaving this mortal coil, whose smiles and skinned knees and tufts of hair I will never kiss? Who is it that will never brush my cheek with peanut butter lips and smooth my hair with grubby fists? Whose laughter and tears are falling drop by precious drop on this stark bathroom floor tonight? Cell by cell the sad parade drips on, cramping home no longer needed beats the sorrowed time as the tears and baby meet upon my dirty floor.