I think of the kids I may or may not have. I think about
their hair, the possible dark-brown curls. Baby fingers
tapping on my face. I haven’t made up my mind yet,
but my body is making decisions before I am ready

to make them. I can’t seem to say what it is I want
out loud. I can almost see all my different lives, almost
taste them, like trying to catch the tail end of a cinematic
dream before it evaporates. I want to capture it, a glimpse,

sneak a peek at each distant future before the View-Master
reel clicks. I want to follow the perfume of each life
I could live and linger in it: the vanillas. Milk leaking
from my breasts. Cereal. The piquant odor of parenthood.

The one where I am a mother negotiating happiness.
The one where I am not a mother and still negotiating
happiness, beauty, and rest. Almost 39, and I’ve never
loved myself more, yet nostalgia wavers all around me

like a montage of mirages muddling memories, complicating
hope, making me miss things I’ve already mourned.
The bargaining—ain’t it a bitch? The bargaining aspect
of grief, to constantly release that which I’ve already

let go of, but how the water in my mind brings it all back
like the flood current each day, and each morning, in the ebb
I see the seafloor for what it is, another landscape of loss
and renewal, another augur deciphering the tea leaves

in the tide pool revealing the children I might never name,
have, or hold. There is a finite number of eggs and books
inside me. I am trying to release them. I am trying to mourn
the possible futures bursting before me in a fantastic finale

of fireworks, bursting in my mouth like red caviar as I try
to find the right words to say goodbye to little faces I can
only imagine. I’m not sure what I want. Each decision seems
to dissolve at the edge of the beach softened by the watercolor

cream of winter floating above the same shore where Eliot wrote
“The Waste Land” after a mental breakdown a hundred and one
years before me, writing “On Margate Sands. / I can connect /
Nothing with nothing.” I keep looking at the gentle waves

for answers without trying to make another metaphor.
What if the image of what I’m feeling is too heavy to be
carried over into language? Maybe in another life you get
to live out all the lives you’ve imagined. Maybe in this life

I become who I am by not knowing—