I awake anemic and bloodlet. My body is quickly ridding itself of a harbor. I think perhaps I do not want a child because the price of passage seems too much. Try telling that to muscle and tendon just oozing with fertility, like a carving cut straight from the vine. My partner is positive he doesn’t want children, and then it becomes contentious, like, Well maybe I do want one. Or the option to want one, to draw against a bond for an unspecified amount, at any point in the future.

My throat is now opening up slowly, like a bruised flower. I’ve been sick for weeks, first this, then that, cold flu virus a non-located un-rallying to live. Now I can talk again, think. The throat no longer closed over like a crab closed over a secret.

I went to a reading last night, lovely reading, lovely friends. Friends I throw parties for, or with, or in turn enter their apartments for their parties. When I’m feeling churlish, which is often, lately, I see that they are all better friends with each other than with me. I now move in different circles, which makes this easy. Often it hurts. I resent a small part of them their affection, but today, feeling new-sprung, happy to perch, alight where I can, I need no more. They’re all so young and beautiful. I’m not that much older, maybe five or six years, but there’s so much you stop trusting in incremental amounts, added wariness before throwing yourself into things. Or rather, you have to throw, will continue to throw, will maybe move/ break up/ come together/ start/ quit/ apply, but one stops placing so much hope in these things. You’ve learned with time’s tutelage that only you will go on, survive whatever newest phase of life, and so you cannot attach all of yourself to it; to continue, part of you must look at it from afar. You become a little amused by each stage, as if it is a child you will have to rear, then say goodbye to. Each passage its own price.

One of the readings last night was from my good friend Bo, and the reading was good, I mean it was mostly excellent. For some reason it’s always easier to know in another writer when they are pushing a little too hard, signaling a little too much, in a way you almost never can in your own work. But the reading was wonderful, his voice and the way he turned the page and swayed. The room full, with so many warm faces. The small house with brightly-painted walls, plants curling judiciously along them, crushed with people laughing, beaming at each other. I talked with the hostess, Marie Pechu, about how our ballet instructor is a wonderful dancer but not really a teacher. She doesn't do near enough to explain even spatially where to put your arms in the plie, how the muscles should be in a certain position of the leg’s rond de jambe. I told her, “Listen, I mean— listen!” as if it were all as simple as this, and she laughed at me kindly, to say she knew how hard yet how necessary it is to find fault. She herself admitted she hadn’t learned that much. And I talked to a few other women there, one I like and one I dislike, the both best friends and so, similar, but one treating me slightly more genuinely than the other, even in her dismissal, instead of a fake concern, so I like her more.

Anyway, my friend Bo, he read a short story, which for me are always spectacular. Just the attempt of them! A short story is like the perfect knot, it either only succeeds by holding from mechanisms in all the right places, or instead of falling apart, it becomes merely nothing at all.

Did his succeed, or become nothing, merely links? I don’t know. But he had much more of an understanding than I do of the short story. I can only every write towards novels. The scope of events, for me, is like the child’s mind: and then what? And then what? And then what? Tell me, oh wild voice! I never want it to end, can often lull myself into believing it doesn’t have to. For me, perhaps, the only way to write a short story would be to write or at least plot a novel, cut out whole sections of it that you only allude to with a few words, and then change the ending to go in an entirely different way than what you planned, as if the whole thing was actually about something else. Not a bad idea. Perhaps I’ll even try it.

But the point isn’t whether his short story succeeded, but that he was beautiful. That they were all beautiful, all their joylit faces, fully alive, coming out slowly into the warm room like a crab letting go of a secret, and all their secrets were small things, trivial, what their plans were that night or when they’d last talked to their boyfriend or what their grandmother told them about, where they got this hairclip and the recipe for the bread that failed the first two times, they were all beautiful, glowing, and I was there among them, one of the girls thanked everyone and she started crying, my womb is sloughing off, like the crab who pulls herself from inside herself and then, shucked, leaves her skin behind, I’m re-emerging, the child of myself, bent and brittle from illness but the day is long, I’ve come out of it, and perhaps against odds I do have some say on where I should go next, who I shall next be. And the moon outside, oh weary, faded, lilac watcher, the light silver and raining down, water drops on the ends of the branches and the branches themselves hung by so many invisible strings, why at night does everything not just get seeped of all color but instead turn blue, World, oh world, you kill me, and it’s these things, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye that, however deluded they might seem later, remind me, it is okay to live. Even as I think, turning to look at my partner as the rain falls, I do want a child someday, and, maybe, you are too much my child. We return together home with our arms linked and I think, even this moment, this phase will pass, let it not pass just yet.

Caitlin Palmer is a writer from the Midwest interested in malaise, ecstasy, and everything in between. She has work published or forthcoming at terrain.org, DIAGRAM, Essay Daily, and others. She served as the Hemingway Fellow at the University of Idaho, and has received support from Tin House and Napa Valley writers conferences. She teaches at the University of Missouri and is represented by Janklow & Nesbit for a novel on ecological issues in the Midwest.