untitled 28

Wine makes my vagina feel funny.

I sit on a rocking chair and slowly drink a glass of wine.

I'm not where I want to be, but I know how to get there.

When I turned 26 I spent the day forgetting it was my birthday. I was somewhere in West Virginia. A place I couldn't find again if I tried. With people whose last names I never learned. Holding a nameless baby.

You won't understand this, sometimes I don't understand it either. But there it is, our life taking us into strange places if we allow it to.

This baby felt weightless in my arms. Dressed only in a diaper, the baby's skin stuck to mine. It was about 99 degrees. The grandmother had placed the child in my arms before I could protest.

I asked if she had ever been in love. She said she was married at 15. She said she was scared and didn't even know what love really felt like until she had her first child. And then she liked the feeling so much, she kept having children. She said the man she married had never loved her, but that her children did and that sometimes, that's all that a woman could ask for.

She told me I looked good holding a baby.

I told her I wanted to fall in love, she said not to look for love. She said that sometimes we have to make our own love and sometimes love finds us. I asked her how I would know if I should make my own love or find it.  She said if she knew that, she'd be a millionaire.

She moved behind me and began to separate my hair into three parts and then proceeded to braid it. She said not to worry. She said that love was already looking for me.

I silently cried as she braided my hair.