When You Were Real

You were only here for seven weeks. You were in my tummy for 28 weeks before that of course, but we didn't really know you.

After the seven weeks were up, and you were gone, I thought of you as an angel, soul or spirit. Someone whose presence is always here although the part of you that was physical was gone.  I talk to you all the time in my head and talk about you a lot to others.

Your brother, the youngest of our boys, talks about you as if you are living another life elsewhere. "Sylvie-Rose is a toddler now" he says as if he has the same image I have of the child you should have been, growing up three years behind him. 

One day, he said something that broke my heart. He was talking about you, when you were here, when you occupied the Moses basket and had your nappy changed and were fed expressed milk from a bottle as you had only ever latched on rather lazily at my breast.

He said "When Sylvie-Rose was here, when she was Real."

And it seemed so harsh, that truth, than when you can't see someone, hear them, touch them, then they aren't Real, not in the true sense of the word.

There is comfort in Reality. Comfort in hugging your brothers, physically feeling their presence, knowing with absolute certainty that they are least are Real and no-one can tell me they're not.  I can't ever truly have that with you. I feel that you have sent me signs, little reassurances that you're still with me. Nothing that I could ever prove was truth, no Empirical Evidence of your Reality.  Just about enough for me to say "That was Sylvie-Rose" And on bad days, I don't even have that.

All I have is faith, hope and love that floats out somewhere into the ether. And I miss the reality of you.