A milestone, and the old corridor underneath it.
Sage hasn’t started play school.
And I’m already feeling the leaving.
Not the practical part. The shoes. The bag. The timetable.
The turn of the body when you walk away.
I thought I’d meet it on the day. Instead it’s been meeting me in the kitchen, in the car, in the quiet moments where nothing is happening and my chest tightens anyway.
Anticipation is supposed to be light.
This isn’t.
It’s the mind walking ahead of me, opening the door early, checking the room for danger, then doing it again. Like repetition can make it safe.
It can’t.
NICU Made Doors Mean Something Else
Phoenix, Sage, and Rí were born early. Twenty seven and twenty eight weeks.
NICU for weeks.
You don’t leave a hospital in those weeks. You exit it.
The difference matters.
In the beginning I believed I could outwork the fear. Be calm enough, organised enough, agreeable enough, and the world would reward me with certainty.
It didn’t.
I learned a different skill instead.
How to walk out of a room while my baby stayed behind.
How to put my hand on a handle and turn it, while every part of me wanted to stay pressed against the incubator, watching the rise and fall of a chest that wasn’t fully mine to protect.
How to get into the car with empty arms.
How to go home and lie down, not because I was done, but because my body finally reached its limit.
And then to return the next day and do it again.
The leaving becomes routine.
The cost doesn’t.
What My Body Learned
People assume the memory lives in the mind.
Mine lives lower.
In the throat.
In the stomach.
In the way my breath shortens before I can find a reason.
Back then, my body learned a rule.
Leave, and you won’t know.
Leave, and anything can happen.
Leave, and the world may not hand you back what you walked out with.
That isn’t a sentence I repeat to myself. It doesn’t need words. It shows up as urgency, as control, as a quiet need to keep my hands on what I love.
So now, when I picture Sage stepping into play school, my mind says, this is normal.
My body hears the old corridor.
A child.
A doorway.
Me turning away.
Phoenix in the Milestones
Phoenix changed the shape of time.
Not in a poetic way. In a real one.
There are milestones you plan for.
And there are the milestones you never get.
The ones that sit behind the others like a shadow you don’t have to mention for it to be there.
A first day is supposed to be a beginning.
In my body it also feels like an echo.
Not because Sage is in danger.
Because I have lived the kind of leaving that does not come with reassurance.
I have lived the kind of leaving where you smile and nod and walk out, and then sit in the car and feel the fear arrive in full, like it has been waiting for you to stop moving.
Grief doesn’t always appear as grief.
Sometimes it comes as administration.
A form.
A start date.
A small goodbye rehearsed in advance.
The Decision to Come Back
The work I’ve done hasn’t made me soft.
It’s made me honest.
The difference is that I don’t confuse control with love anymore.
I don’t call bracing “strength.”
I know what it looks like when I begin to leave my body.
It looks like efficiency.
It looks like getting things done.
It looks like disappearing in plain sight.
So the decision now is small and daily.
Not to erase what happened.
Not to pretend doors are neutral.
Just to stay here when my system tries to run ahead.
To breathe when the tightening starts.
To let the memory rise without letting it steer.
To allow Phoenix to be present without letting loss parent the living.
Sage hasn’t started yet.
The door is still in front of us.
And I can already feel the part of me preparing to walk away without me.
This time, I’m not leaving myself behind.
Beidh ár lá linn.
Our day will come
