Broken Country

by Clare Leslie Hall

It’s strange, the patchwork stories we tell someone when we want them to catch up, a shortcut to knowing us, as if such a thing were possible.

me. Perhaps that’s what it is, this feeling never experienced before, elation, excitement, a furious kind of happiness. Perhaps this is love.

Frank and I dance around each other’s sadness. Any couple who has lost a child will tell you the same. You see it in the other, of course you do, but it’s like you’re on a seesaw of grief, and all you want is to avoid tipping the other one down.

It’s no good: I cannot resist. This is how Adam must have felt biting into his apple. One minute there’s purity and innocence, the next I am fully immersed in a world I wish I had never entered.

There is nothing to do now except push, and even the pain—no words for the intensity, like being ripped in two, worse than that—feels good, helpful. My body has taken over.

What can I say about the instant rush of love I feel for the tiny human in my arms? The dear little face I don’t yet know but am already addicted to.

The pain of that. There is nothing I can say. My whole life moving forward will be filled with people who never knew my son.

In bed I feel more myself with Gabriel, or rather, more like the carefree young woman I was before heartbreak altered me, and tragedy molded me into someone I never wanted to be. It’s addictive, this temporary shedding of skin, this glimpse of the person Gabriel remembers.

With him, for a few hours, I get to be unbroken.