Love In The Age Of Not Wanting A Baby

There is always an ending. 

I bow out early, into a lightning-cracked sky, before the show ends and the streets flood with coats on sidewalks, some patrons silently tender (her fingertips curl around her girlfriend’s arm as she leads them to the car), some dissatisfied (“twenty two and a half years, four kids, two houses, how do you end a marriage where you’re so deeply intertwined,” another woman thinks, her grip equally tenacious against her husband’s arm, he’s thinking about killing himself and in a year and a half, six months after they divorce, he will), headlights shining through rain, heels cheek-kissing cement, brochures discarded in bathroom stalls and purse pockets and the crevices of concession stand counters.

I bow out early because I don’t like the traffic on the way home: fleeting, agonizing. 

I bow out early because they’ll have loved it, “Best supporting character I’ve ever seen, I’ll tell ya that,” “And how about the scene where he pretended to faint? H-oh my god-” and I’ll disagree, try to make a joke that doesn’t land, and no one will stir. Someone will cough eventually; not a real cough. “Um, ok,” wide-eyes blinking back at me, narrowing, rolling, perceiving my banter as bitterness. “These people are idiots,” I’ll think, but I’ll feel a low-baritone-dread (then fizzes of shame, like bubbles in champagne) in the lining of their silence, reaching for their phones when it’s gone on too long, all the same.

I am always the tag-along being dragged out, “Why did you say that? What were you possibly thinking when you said that,” Someone who loves me will say in the backseat of an Uber afterwards, “It was a play on words, I was kidding,” I’ll start, but the resentment will rise and fester in the space between us like we’re hotboxing the car with it, we’ll be high on it, soon enough, slamming doors, someone muttering under their breath to the driver, (who’s high) “Um, thanks sorry about that, drive safe.

I bow out early so I don’t say the wrong thing. 

I bow out early because I can’t stand endings.

This is ours. 

It was my last night with you. I knew that, you didn’t: a very old song. 

“Of course I love you,” you’d said, before. 

In August, in early summer, last November, and the week I’d turned twenty-six. A carousel conversation, never changing.  

“So love me enough to not want kids!” I cringe at the feigned casualness of the words, superficial, morose: A cruel ask–but, really, it wasn’t.

“You’d be a wonderful mother,” the gentlest accusation. 

I used to be the girl running out of the party, crying. The perpetual youngest child, gray line (because it’s not black, nor white) blurred between passionate and dramatic, high-maintenanced and spoiled, manipulative and charming. Full of big, ridiculous tantrums, heart ripped out of my chest and sewn, bloody and beating, on my sleeve. Someone would run after me but I’d already be coming undone somewhere, my melancholy beautiful and sad, my phone turned off till the next morning.

I bow out early because it has been a long time since I’ve cried. 

“Please just take me out to the back and shoot me,” I’d say to you, but you might not understand my pensiveness.

You probably wouldn’t. 

I look at the sky. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that expression. A long time since I’ve looked at someone and felt the way that I feel when I look at you. Since I’ve seen someone wear a watch. Since the moon sparkled, golden-tinted, with so many stars around it. It’s been the longest time of all, since I’ve been understood.

Begrudgingly, someone’s Mom.

That’d be the compromise. (How this wouldn’t have to end.)

Push a stroller, never sleep again, cut my hair short, burn dinner, delouse with a fine-tooth comb in the backyard, rinse and repeat. I could make pancakes in the shape of mickey mouse like my parents used to. It’s just three small circles, draw the eyes with syrup or whipped cream. 

I could do it.

Have a little beach baby, salt and sand in their hair, raise them by the coast, strap them in the back of a golf cart like all the locals do, idyllic, dreamy, but they’d of course still be Eagles fans, with zillions of cousins back home, still have traces of my New Jersey accent mispronouncing their vowels (wooder, hay-lf) Flights are so cheap, and under two hours. Carpool and practice and hand-made Halloween costumes. A little blonde girl, we wear matching skirts. 

I could do it.

Teach them about God, fight with their math teacher, (it’s always their math teacher), switching the phone from one cheek to the other, grimacing in the most pleasant inside voice,“words are really their strong suit,” be too-harsh on them, then too-soft. School lunch sandwiches in the shape of little cookie cutters, with a note. Tuck them in scented, cotton-candy patterned sheets.

I don’t want it. 

When I was younger, I’d dreamed of being a mother, like I was taught to. Wanted ten of them; loud, bustling Christmases, emotionally-intelligent sons who’d blush to their college girlfriends, “I have sisters, I get it.”

But there’s no version of my future where I draft them in, now.

(Of this, everyone has an opinion they must burden you with the dead weight of: “you’ll change your mind when you’re older,” “when you fall in love with the right person, trust me, it just happens,” “I never wanted kids either, ha!”)

Some truths you just know. 

So I leave, and we don’t last.

The story ends

until one day I run into you again at the <airport terminal . supermarket checkout line . pharamacy parking lot . doctor’s office . atlantic beach restaurant > and you boast, “These are my kids,” and you’ll tell me their fuck-ass names and I’ll wave at them, red-cheeked and kind of ugly.

And we’ll both smile, you know? ‘Cause there was never going to be any other kind of ending.