A Cold Day

It doesn’t make sense, when the day starts with sunshine and ends, wet and unsettled, grey and cold.

It doesn’t make sense, when a friend comes. Rings the bell. Shines the light. Then disappears, shuts the door behind them, to seal in the silence.

It doesn’t make sense, at all, the emptiness of a womb, while the body still pulses with milk and blood and the instinct to hold.

The day I remember– like I gift now, my friend I give it to you– I walked into Paddington Station, clutching a slip the sliver of hope.

The last warmth of the last bit of any child that could carry my DNA.

The day I remember like a cold, wet slap.

I walked into Paddington Station, holding my legs together as walked, bent and not knowing the cutting heat which pulsed inside was the last warmth I would know for three years. At least.

And the black smoke hung over the waiting trains. And the people in navy suits pushed past me. And I looked over just as a stack of pounds thrust themselves at a woman from an ATM’s mouth.

So, I went inside the bathroom at Paddington Station, in London, cradling my womb on the outside as it ached, and I passed the thick, bloody child– whatever you call it, that’s what it was– into the toilet. And I suppose outside the stall there were noises and there was talking and there must have been the usual urine and fecal smells.

But inside the cold walls, the cold porcelain, we were alone and it was quiet.

And I remember, that day, walking out of Paddington Station– past the sushi bowls going round and round on its conveyor belt, and the cappuccino sippers in their table corrall. I remember the cold alone.

It was a cold day.

And even if I remember that Colin was there, it didn’t make sense.

What sense could it make. In November, in Paddington, saying goodbye to my smallest little family, then just one, now I know as ALL– as I used my feet on a sidewalk as if it were any other day?

With my back to the anonymous bustle, I thought I’d just walk away.

I doesn’t make sense, the souffles that rise and fall, like empires, like bloody regimes with children looking down the barrel of machine guns.

It doesn’t make sense.