Word Count: 426
She was seventeen that year. She knew everything; knew nothing. Amazing how you can look backwards and see things the way they really were instead of how you perceived them when you were young.
She couldn’t have an abortion because she was Catholic. She couldn’t have the baby because her father would go nuts. She was afraid to go off on her own and her boyfriend wanted nothing to do with a wife much less a family. The least traumatic, the easiest, the choice most likely to affect only her and no one else was then, the abortion. As a Catholic, she decided that was the only just way to do it, accept the private pain as a personal penance.
A lost summer becomes small in the span of a lifetime though it never fades entirely from memory. At seventeen, her belly growing bigger to bursting, away from her family and friends, it seemed like three months lasted years. When she returned home it was only for a few weeks before she set out to college two states away. By then she had tasted distance, bitter and cold. Still, she came back every few weeks from the beginning till campus nearly became her new home.
In her freshman year she learned that what she’d expelled from her body was just a clump of dependent cells, a bloody mass, a tumor; very different than her concept of a sweet little baby. It was the same time she started sleeping in Sunday mornings after late, great, Saturday nights. It might have been guilt or it might have been new-found innocence that kept her from going to church. Whatever it was, she was changing, yet some of the personal pain stayed on in her soul.
She took a full time job at the firm where she’d interned. Came home for the Holidays and rushed back to her life with relief, leaving the girl that she’d been behind to walk streets made only of memory. She married a man she met through a friend where she worked. She got pregnant, never connecting the first time with this second, the difference too wide between the fearful despair and the joy of this welcome child.
Memory plays tricks on the mind and the past is as alive as the present. It was strange, she told no one and couldn’t explain it, but the baby reminded her more of her old high school love than the man who she’d married. She’d laugh it off but it made her wonder about parallel time.
