A memory, a stabbing thought, will just hit me in the face like a cement brick 100 times throughout the day and remind me how much I am still hurting. Certain triggers make it all come back as if today was the last time I spoke to him, or the last time I felt the signs of life inside of me. For a second, for a few minutes, for an hour, as long as my mind and time permit me, I am transported back to when time was on my side.

Time is my enemy now. Time reminds me that I should be two months pregnant, that I should have 7 more months of growing someone inside me. Time will continue to be against me by forcing me to remember who I should be becoming, what should be happening within me. Time will remind me when I should be celebrating a baby’s first birthday. Time will remind me again in 12, 16, and 18 years when other milestone ages would have been reached.

Time will also move slowly to erase the memories, images, and feelings from my mind, as to cause me more pain. Time is not in a rush. Why should it be; for me? I cheated time to make the most of mine. Time will make sure I suffer longer, as a small act of punishment for taking away a life that should have been, could have been, if only I personally did not want more time; time for myself, time to achieve my goals, time to be selfish and think of me and only me. My time did not want to sacrifice itself for another’s time to begin.

And so here I am, suspended in time, caught in the middle of a war between remembering and forgetting. The suffering is slow and the pain is dull and aching with bursting moments of sadness that pull me down into negativity and darkness. The emptiness is growing into a tangible entity that threatens to take over my mind. I still hunger for his touch, yearn for the sound of his name or news of him; I still imagine his hands in mine, his arms around me. I remember what it was like to place a hand on my stomach and feel the hard, growing bump that could have been a child. I dream of holding my baby and kissing its soft head, pictures from a perfect world where time would once again be an ally.

I question how past moments in time could have been real at all, as my mind tries to sort between the grey voids and illusions of happiness that used to exist. It could not have been real that I would be 2 months pregnant as of two days ago; that I was ever with him, or that just a month ago we were “together”, together in the twisted sense of whatever we ever were. Those times have blended together into a blur of heartbreak and rejection, and every recollection digs another cut deeper into my skin, making time agonizingly drag on and on and on.

Time won this battle, it beat me. Time will continue to win as I struggle to add meaning to mine again, while thinking at the same moment that the time of an unborn child should be getting closer to beginning, if only it had not been ended; stopped…stolen.