There are three ways I can win this fight.  No, wait, I was wrong.  There are the three fights no one can win.  We must live knowing that everything is fleeting.  People will leave us.  We will leave.  And yet, here we go.  We make lives, have dreams, and even sometimes believe it’s all here, was all building, just for us.  But if we were once young, indestructible, outside those other rules, we won’t be forever.  And yet that feeling arises sometimes that we want never to stop being young; to stop being; to stop.

This was happening at breakfast.  Cecilia’s new boyfriend Bo was at the kitchen sink, describing the new artists at work, the upcoming movie.  Cecilia had found it all fascinating, noting to herself that before Bo she never had conversations about rotoscoping and compositing, nor eaten onion bagels for breakfast.  She also noted that in their past eight months together she had not cried in front of Bo.  Not because Bo was the sort of man that took up all the sadness from a room – a man like Richard.  No, simply because she cried a lot after her husband Richard died, and what liquid was left she cried and cried when her mother died.  She assumed she had been wrung dry, over extended, as if she borrowed at that time on future tears.

But earlier that morning, standing naked at the bathroom mirror, fingering the little seafoam-green soaps left in a small silver dish on the sink for looks, she had cried.  It was a flurry cry, one that started as a frustrated snarl but spent itself before reaching real tears - but a cry nonetheless. 

 Now Bo was pushing the plunger slowly down the French Press and Cecilia wondered how to announce she was one month pregnant.  You’re still young.  Thirty-five.  A voice in her mind had begun repeating this, and Cecilia knew neither how to take the information nor what it meant at that moment.  But in that moment, she had a secret wish: If only this baby were part Richard’s and part mom’s.  No, if only somehow Richard and mom… But she stopped herself, worried she would not be able to go on with that desire unleashed. 

“I’m boring you, I’m sorry.”

“No, no, go on; I just look dazey sometimes.”

Bo walked over, kissed her forehead, and Cecilia again felt that sinking fear that since her mother’s death she had in fact lost the ability to know others; that others would now always seem to her like store window displays.

Cecilia sat paralyzed in her chair, but in her mind she fled the kitchen, pushing out through the flimsy dusty screen door.  She could not at once accommodate both states, she knew.  One would have to take the lead.  If only this baby were somehow part them, I could go on ok.  A real part, a real way to live forever.  But no, there were only two ways to win this fight.  And Cecilia wondered which, in the next moment, Bo stroking her hair, which would take the lead and which would be left to follow.