The Halfway Point

On the promise of showing up

I thought it was a bad omen, the sudden splatter of blood on the windshield while I was driving the backroads. Maybe a wasp exploded at great speed, or something else dropped dead mid-flight. It took many spritzes of washer fluid, many frantic passes of the windshield wipers to clear the carnage. Death, said the spreading streak of red, in the middle of a bright summer day.

There’s another life growing inside me now—a baby due to be born two seasons away, in early December—so my heart is extra attuned to visions of life and death these days. Everywhere, there is evidence of it. The toddling turkey chicks on the side of the road. The goldfinch crushed in the front grate of my mother’s car. The blood-red hue of the scarlet tanager, the daylily, the honeysuckle berry. All vital, all humming with the delicate force that can be coaxed or extinguished.

I’ve started waking at 5:30am to squeeze in some writing time before River gets up. Sometimes I get 45 minutes, sometimes just 5 or 10, but I’ll take whatever I can get. Just as I feel the quickening—the baby kicking and moving inside me—I tune into the stirring of creative thought too. I am putting it into action, that famous Freud quote: When inspiration doesn’t come to me, I go halfway to meet it.

Halfway between dreaming and waking, halfway across the house to the Prussian blue armchair, halfway dressed in the humid early morning, I go to the page.

I go to the page, but there’s a part of me that’s scared I’ll go halfway and nothing will be there. That despite all the effort, I will have nothing to show for it. Just half-formed thoughts, useless as guts scraped off a windshield.

It’s that old childhood fear of throwing a party where no one shows up. It’s the way I felt at the work event I organized recently, with the wet, untouched cheese platter and all those empty chairs. Every under-attended Half Waif show in every too-large venue. Every hyped-up plan that falls short of expectation. I have gone halfway before, and nobody, and nothing, came.

I am halfway through gestation now, but past experience tells me that a pregnancy does not equal a baby. All that effort, and what if?

Still, I go to the page because it is a promise. Not a promise of what will be, but a promise of who I’ll become. I go halfway, and even if there is nothing on the other side, I understand that I will be changed by the act of travel.

It was only later, picking berries with River, that I realized the splatter on the windshield wasn’t blood at all. It was a juicy fruit dropped from a great height. Don’t eat those ones, I tell him when we pass the clutches of pearl-sized honeysuckle berries, crimson and glistening, which are poisonous to humans. Those are for the birds. “Bird berries,” we call them.

It wasn’t an omen, then. It was a cardinal losing its lunch. It was cosmic comedic relief. And maybe it was some kind of message too. Halfway between home and where I was headed, it was poison detonated on a pane of glass, with me and this little life safe inside.