"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I yearn to belong. I suppose that’s why it hurts so much that I can’t have children. I feel the ephemerality of my existence like a burden these days. I had a brother, but he disowned me twenty years ago. My father is dead, and my mother casually says hurtful things every time I ring her. I have my husband’s family, but divorce has shown me how tenuous those relations are. I live in a country I am not a citizen of, and I don’t want to return to the country I was born in. In the worst times, I feel I am an exile, estranged from happier realms by chance and weird fortune. To have a child was, at last, to have someone to whom I belonged, inextricably; for whom I am significant.

So if there will be no child, there will be writing. I must let go of old attachments and focus on the present: nature, community, living an empathetic life. Every word I write, then, is that attempt to mark my passage through the land of the living; to each word, I will belong.

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