The bush blooms sunset roses for a few weeks, and begins to die. Turning over the leaves, I find tiny green aphids. Logan tells me how to kill them, but instead I let the roses go. Green turns into brown turns into that strange ashy beige. Name it the color `Where there was life', but I can't care. This is just one more memory I couldn't bring myself to save. Tomorrow night, I'll carry it to the dumpster. Maybe sleep will come easier with an empty balcony. Maybe the right kind of grave is one lined with paper bags and empty bottles, old stuffed teddy bears and a broken crib. Maybe, another maybe, but I wouldn't know.

I try to sleep, twisted onto my side with Logan's arms wrapped loosely around the curve of my waist. Five months ago we moved out of the mansion and into our new apartment, with firm hopes of a happy-ever-after future. As it turns out, Happy ever after doesn't last nearly as long as you'd think they would. There are too many variables. Too many of life's wild curve balls.

The bedroom window stays open, and the car alarms weave with angry shouts, dance around the sirens, lick at the edges of the metal scraping metal. Sometimes I wake up to the walls painted in blue and red and blue and red. Sometimes I dream through everything; it's strange what becomes ordinary so quickly. It's stranger, what becomes necessary, and strangest, what becomes a lullaby.

She's gone. My baby. I know she was a girl, I could feel it. Just like all the others from the last time and the time before that and the time before that. I know she was a girl and that she was mine. And she was a fighter—boy was she a fighter! I carried her for five months before the inevitable happened. I've come to think of it as inevitable now; a fact. She's gone and there are a hundred things I wish I knew, a hundred things it's better that I'll never know. I might torture myself for days with the questions I shouldn't ask and the photographs of every moment that won't be mine, but I am not going to push this back and let some ache go on for too long, locked in quiet. I believe in love and I believe in allowing grief. I believe in love; I believe.

Here's how I imagine it my sweet, darling, baby girl.

You would've pulled the books from the bottom shelves and ripped their pages from their spines; when you're not even two, literature is just confetti. I left my paints on the living room floor last night, and the painting on the easel. If you were here, I couldn't do that; you'd squeeze the tubes, run chubby fingers across the wet canvas before drying them on the rug. But if you were here--- I would've taught you red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, but then, I would've taught you scarlet and persimmon, magenta and lime and azure, violet and ochre and lilac and terra cotta. I would've let you paint with me as soon as you were old enough to hold the plastic palette knife. I think we could've been happy. I'm too young to be perfect, but I would've tried.

The second bedroom is Logan's home gym. The living room has a bar instead of a playpen. I have classes early and work late, and sleep in whenever I can. None of this would be the same; this city might have stayed a stranger. You might've been the dues ex machine for our happing ending, or maybe not. I think we, you and I and Logan, could've made a happy ending on our own.

I would've watched you sleep, to make sure you didn't stop breathing. I would've read to you, even before you knew my face. I would've painted your room the color of the sky with clouds on the ceiling. I would've called everyone I knew when you said your first word. I would've made macaroni necklaces with you. I would've sewn your Christmas stocking myself. I would've written you letters about watching you grow up, so you could read them when you got older. I would've taken you to the ocean as often as I could.

I would've loved you.

I don't know what kind of mother I would've been, or if I'd have been so awfully bad that God knew it best when he saved you from me; good or bad, the chance to discover was taken out of my hands. My punishment is this uncertainty. This is the ache that stays.

I finished a painting last night, a hundred colors you'll never see.

I never stop saying that I'm sorry.

Tomorrow could be the first day of the rest of my life, but tonight is still just tonight. I promise myself, I promise Logan, I'll be better in the morning—and I will. I will get up, bruised and ready to keep on breathing. I will say fuck you to the sun coming in and I will glare at myself in the mirror, hair tangled and eyes still tired. For tonight, for tomorrow, for a little while, for the rest of my life---it's alright if I miss her. It's alright if I'm a little angry, a little torn, a little raw. As long as I feel alive, I am. This will get better. This is enough.