A HAUNTING

The room at the end of our upstairs hall haunts me. Honestly, it mocks me. The soft blue walls mock me. The floating bookshelves on the wall (left by the previous owner) mock me. But most of all, the emptiness mocks me.

When we bought our house, that room at the end of the hall gave me joy and hope. It was a promise of our future. For months it was full of things – empty and half full moving boxes, Christmas decorations, our high school yearbooks, my Grandma Jean’s wedding china. It was a collection of our pasts, and I was ready to start our future. I put such an emphasis on cleaning it out, making my husband haul the heavy boxes up to the attic, never allowing anything to take up space in that room once we cleared it out. Our pasts safety and neatly stored away, steadfast in the idea of our future.

It’s been sitting empty for two years. I guess I got ahead of myself.

And now, like I said, it haunts me. I went in there the other day, sat in the middle of the room, alone and teary eyed, trying to find purpose in the waiting. Trying to find hope in that room. Trying not to let it haunt me.

Infertility has made me a bitter and broken person. It has taken something from me. I have taken 22 pregnancy tests, all with the same result. 22 negative tests. 22 mornings I cried for what we don’t have, for what I can’t do. 22 times I thought my life would change. 22 days I went to work and pretended like my life hadn’t just quietly come apart at the seams. Three minutes on 22 separate occasions were hope lived and then died.

What sort of world have I made for myself? A place where hope is stifled. Where hope feels like the enemy, the anti-hero. And how long can I survive here? I don’t mean for that question to be rhetorical. How long can we survive when we run from hope, when we fear it? And when – and how - do I pull myself out of the darkness? When is enough, enough? And what will be left of me when two lines appear?

When. Not if. See, hope lives and breathes despite logic, and maybe that’s what makes it so dangerous. You can’t ever fully put it out. There’s always an ember burning just beneath the surface that might spark a flash without warning or hesitation. And before you have a chance to put it out, that one single ember becomes a flame and then a fire. Burning and raging without any regard for the damage it will do.

But it’s exhausting balancing hope and logic. It’s human nature to find hope in hard, impossible situations. It’s how we protect ourselves. I have lived in that hope – I had hope after surgery, I had hope after the first, second, and third IUI – and I have died in the disappointment, and I do so quietly and alone as to not disturb those around me.

Infertility breaks you down. It pushes you well past whatever limits you thought you had, until you’re left naked in a crowded room, vulnerable and exposed and yet somehow alone and isolated at the same time. It forces you to adapt. My adaptation has been to pretend. I pretend I’m okay, that I’m strong, that I’m not in pain, that it doesn’t consume me. I pretend I’m the same person I was two years ago, which is the biggest lie of them all. I am not the same. Not even close. I hardly recognize myself.

I can’t do the one thing my body was made for. Women were built to have babies. To create life. To give birth. And yet, here I am, in purgatory. Waiting. And as I wait, watching my friends’ lives change and shift I can feel them drifting away, slowly and softly in the way most people don’t notice until it’s already happened. I stare at their growing baby bumps with both deep love and unwavering envy, unaware until this very moment that two such opposing things can be true at once. I’m not sure what scares me more – the waiting or the possibility that all waiting and all my wanting will somehow cause them to drift too far from me. Will my presence become uncomfortable, awkward at some point? Will I become a burden to them? Someone that takes too much energy to navigate?

But it’s possible, and probably more likely, that I’m the one pushing them away. I can feel myself withdrawing from them. Perhaps out of fear that they’ll see me becoming a different person, someone they don’t recognize, and what if they don’t like who’ve I’ve become. Or maybe I’m just too embarrassed or scared or ashamed to say that I’m in pain, that I feel incomplete, that my body is undeniably failing me, that infertility isn’t a destructive pain, but a steady erosion that is eating away at every part of me.

But I live with that sharp pain. Everyday. It doesn’t get better; it doesn’t go away. It lingers. And I can feel the walls closing in. Like suddenly the feelings and fears I’ve been pushing away – trying to be the person I used to be – are closing in on me and I can’t hold them at bay any longer. I can’t bear the weight. Yet, the days go by, the earth turns, life continues without pause or interruption, and eventually who I was before fades into the background, silent and invisible. Like a fucking ghost.

I guess it’s not the room at the end of the hall haunting me after all, it’s the woman I used to be, and I doubt I’ll ever shake her. I think she’ll walk beside me forever.

Megan Stebel writes personal essays and fiction about grief, longing, friendship, and the early aughts. She lives in a Central Illinois college town with her family.