Daughter

If I should have a daughter...

well, I won't. 

Let's start there. 

Can't, really.

Even though this boy I love once told me I'd be good at it. 

Having daughters, I mean.

Like your mother, but better, he had said, 

and my mother is the best there is.

So I laughed and slid my feet towards my knees in the passenger's seat of his car,

hair frizzy the way the internet says it is around only those we truly trust,

quietly hoping this moment could just be,

and so it was.

But now my friends are getting married, 

and I'm freshly reminded of the brutality of it all.

It's no longer innocent, to discuss children.

Which makes my secrets no longer a quiet tragedy, 

but cataclysmic. 

I have wanted, my entire life, to be the artist. 

To wield the pen like a sword, this body like a museum.

To create just one thing that could outlive me.

But I wrote into a void of my own creation,

and now just yearn to be the muse.

I don't want to be responsible for conception and beautification,

because the artist is never themselves the art.

I'd rather hang on a wall and have people tell me I'm pretty.

Inspire essays about youth and femininity and spunk.

Grow so old, yet change so little, 

and still know that I am enough.

But nobody has ever loved me to the point of invention,

to the point of liberation,

to the point of absolution.

Nobody has ever shown me this intangible enoughness, 

and so I cannot teach it to my daughter, 

imaginary though she is.

The weeks go slow but the years fast, 

and so I disappear into this magical city that is exhausting to grasp,

my two hands calloused and raw from trying.

I'm alone at the airport and it's no longer cause for alarm,

which is stunning.

Both definitions.

It still feels as much a feat as ever.

I'm still as enamored by this liminal space as ever.

So when the train comes and I don't get on,

when the time comes, and she is not born,

when the end comes, and I am still alone,

I will never know if I'm lost or just wandering,

gold or just glittering.

I will never know if I needed to create all this.

Is being wanted required to be real?

She will never know how badly I wanted to create her.

But being wanted is not enough to be real.

I would know; most days I'm neither.