First Trimester

Our whole lives, all we’d been was blurs. Flashes in a story that was always about somebody else. So it’s only right we tell you this in parts, give you our stories as variegated as the moss we lay our backs on in the sacred moments we get to sleep. We rotate, ripple, revolve, so you can’t know one of us without knowing all of us, love one of us without loving the metal scrape of the truck we found, gave, claimed life inside.

Judge us if you want, but first you have to witness us contort and expand. First you have to watch us become. Then, when you have seen the war we wrestled just to be here, the lives we created out of the void of this place, you can decide whether you want to talk to us about how we were too young, too ravenous, too susceptible to grief. But we bet, once you look out across the water we drank from, you’ll decide we were exactly what we always said we’d be. Girls. Mothers. Big, small, endless. But first, we were this:

Nothing, and then the itchings of a new thing grasping for life. We sense the presence before our bodies register it as a cell worth multiplying. Dry heaving, nausea, a burning heart begins, pulling us in like a frothing current before flinging us to the sand for a gulp of breath. Breasts that had not yet caused an aching in the shoulder blades that most of our mothers knew well soon swell, areolas doubling in size, and us Girls touch them tenderly in the heat of night, like bruised fruit.

Somewhere in these first thirteen weeks, each of us will pause—perhaps in the middle of solving for the area of an isosceles triangle in geometry class or scooping mashed potatoes onto plates in our mothers’ kitchens or mid-fuck in the twin bed of a boy we aren’t sure we like, when we have to cup our titties just to keep them from throbbing as he thrusts—and we will realize what is taking place inside us. Will know, with an undeniable certainty, that we are sharing our bodies with this foreign thing, that it is—in this very moment—expanding.