Short Story: i don't want to hate you

He came up behind you once to put his hands on your belly. We were on a trip to the park, still high on the lingering attraction after a round where our unfinished creations filled the space between us. And when he rubs my stomach, She comes hurtling to me in a daydream for the first time. Like an F-22 through the sound barrier, her entire life—your entire life—floods into my mind, like double-exposed film snapped on the same subjects. I don’t know how I know that you are a Me from a few timelines away. I just do. I see through the impossibly dirty glasses and run my fingers through the dry, curly hair. And she has the same birthmark on the back of her left calf. She is a Me that is not me, but I can see the world through her eyes, and I know she could feel me there in her body with her.

When he wrapped his arms around me and nuzzled his nose into my neck, and when he rubbed my belly up and down, and up and down, I felt she and I slip into each other, and tears filled our eyes at the same time. Mine because I could never give him what he wanted, and hers because she was doomed to. Because in that belly that he was jokingly rubbing, we knew that something had started growing there.

The next time she and I see each other, see through each other, he and I had just had a fight. I went to bed angry. I woke up feeling not refreshed but confused because, all of a sudden, you’re pregnant. Your stomach is bulging, and your feet are swollen, and, oh, god, your nose looks huge. We had never dated anyone before, but there’s something about him that right now feels safe. You know you don’t love him, but you try so hard because you can see how much he loves you and how much he already loves the child in you. You can’t bear to let him down. He’s the perfect boyfriend during the pregnancy. He makes her snacks, he rubs her feet, and when she screams at him, he waits for me to finish and walks over and hugs me.

He’s been prepared for fatherhood his whole life, but you’re not ready to be a mom. I’m afraid. I know that I’ll be bad at it. He doesn’t think so. There are matches in his eyes when he looks at her. A flame that is so full of light but so very delicate that the slightest movement could snuff it. You’re desperate to keep it burning so that smoke and sulfur don’t fill him. I try, but I can’t seem to stop fighting him from pushing him away when all he wants is to be there. But he can’t see what we’ve been through. He doesn’t understand that plants from the desert only grow when resources are abundant and space is plentiful. Having just enough to survive will never let me bloom. He doesn’t know what it takes to create.

The delivery is long and painful. She loses a lot of blood and almost doesn’t survive. When I wake up in the hospital in terrible pain, I see him sitting in the room with us, his head in his hands. We don’t know if he’s praying, but you hope not. He doesn’t have enough of those to last a lifetime, and you don’t want him wasting one on her for having a baby she knew she didn’t want. I’d never get this chance with him.

Our deepest fear is true, though. We never loved him, and you just can’t love this baby. I know we have a beautiful baby, but I never get to see its face. She keeps this much from me, enough to remind me that she and I are not wholly one and that you and her are only fragments within each other's imaginations. You know that your baby is beautiful, and you can see how much he loves it. But I can see that he’s changed toward you because this baby has changed me. I’m angrier, I’m sadder, I’m confused, and I’m desperate to know why this baby that we created loves him but hates her. Why won’t it latch when we try to nourish it? Why does it smile when he takes it from our arms? Why do its cries make me flee instead of calling me closer? Why does its scalp smell sour and rotten? Is it because it can feel how much you hate it? Even if you’d never admit to it, I know you despise that baby.

We want so badly to love him and to love our child with him, but we just can’t. We don’t. We never tell anyone this, but he knows it. And the child is so young, but they know it too. Maybe she hides its face because I might love it more than she could. Maybe her shame is strong enough to hide the truth from the both of us. I don’t know, and she won’t confess. But you wonder deep down how you’d feel if it weren’t impossible for me to be in this position. Because he can’t get me pregnant. I haven’t got the parts. But he jokes about trying, and you know that he would if he could, and I can’t help but think that I would do it for him too.

He leaves you before he leaves her. You’re shocked by this. You saw it coming from the start. He gave both of you a type of love that neither of you deserved. You could never be as Good as him. Even before the baby, the darkness in you constantly threatened to spill over at any given moment. It took all of the strength we had to hold it back. And as time passed, this chipped away at you, piece by piece, until one day a misplaced chisel strike sent you crumbling into pieces. Pieces he had at one time given you permission to fall into. Pieces that now cut him as he tried to sweep.

It feels like the first true difference in your timelines, impacted by the inevitability of their shared biological future together. Because of this baby, their lives are inseparable from each other. But one day he has enough, and he leaves her too. You two. Because you both can’t help but dry out and wither, and waste away into dust. One day, he finds you screaming at the baby as you shake it. Please sleep. Please don’t cry. Why. Won’t. You. Sleep.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t try to diffuse the situation with a joke. No levity has been offered. He just waits for me to stop, and then he stares at you. Wordlessly, I hand it over to him. He takes the baby and leaves. You still get to see it sometimes. I know that it grows up afraid of us. You try desperately to be a good parent to this child, but something in us is broken. Too afraid to break through, too desperate to stay safe to share that with this child.

When the dream starts to fail and my body begins to wake, I feel her ask for a moment. I give it to her. She wants to know how I can be so judgemental to her, so cruel when you know everything that she went through. She’s smart enough to realize early on that it’s not that I hate her. She realizes that you too hate yourself, and together you take a page from his book and you use up a prayer from your limited supply to wish better for each other.

My face is wet when I wake.