Sometimes I forget it entirely, that I’m pregnant. I sit for hours at a coffee shop writing, and my condition slips my mind. These are good days, days when I feel like I’m liberated, just a brain floating in a vat. But the spell is broken when I stand up to go to the bathroom and try to squeeze past the necks of young Brooklyn coffee-shop men, my new stomach grazing the tips of their ears. “Sorry, sorry!” Everyone turns and sees my conspicuous body. I am a stranger who is pregnant. In this way I make more sense to them than I do to myself.
