Did you first feel it when your favorite toy broke, or your doll went missing? Maybe when you cut that doll’s hair and realized it didn’t grow back like yours? Was it when the gray cat with the white M between its ears crawled beneath your family’s Pontiac for warmth in the dead of winter, and your father backed over it on the way to church?
Was it when your mother told you, again, that she couldn’t play dolls play jacks play school because her insulin was too low? Or that she couldn’t do much at all when she came home from the hospital after the first second third heart attack? Was it when you lay small in a hospital bed yourself, small at age seven ten twelve even seventeen, always small because hospitals make humans small no matter their size, and gave yourself over to the surgeons who would make you better by first making you worse?
Was it when your first best friend moved away to California, or your pen pal stopped writing? Or when your family stopped being invited to your cousins’ house for Christmas? Was it when you were told you weren’t good enough for the team? And later, the choir? Or maybe it was that time your friend told a friend that you liked a guy and you heard the guy had said, I’m not going to prom with a fatso, and suddenly the person you thought you were no longer was—and would never be.
Or maybe it was when you first sat awkwardly in an office chair in a conference room—because office chairs make everyone feel wrong sized—in a green polyester suit made for someone ten years older than you, and knew, just as they did before you even began, that you wouldn’t get the job? Or have you been lucky and none of those things ever happened at all? Or they happened, but you called it something else. Not ready to call it by its name.
Most likely, don’t you think, it’s when the family dog died? Or the first dog you and he brought home together to your first house? Perhaps you had to wait for it until you signed the papers, because he no longer wanted what you both had wanted and you still did.
Or until she was born and you realized you felt nothing but it.
Or when he got sick just before he turned two and was never the same after the seizure? When you learned you’d lost the boy you thought he would be, and it never let you forget him.
Certainly when you were two states away and your father was rushed to the hospital, and you were ready to jump into the car, only to learn that he was already gone?
Maybe it simply comes along with age, like sore knees. As the days speed by and you find you can’t catch them in your hand, and maybe no longer in your memory either. Likely it’s when you finally know you can’t give everyone everything they need. Not him. Not her. Not them. You couldn’t give anyone a life without it. Least of all yourself.
You should have known, but couldn’t until you did, that you can only lose anything once. Still, each loss arrives new, though none of them arrives alone.
