I Felt the New Moon

-unedited

For the first time, I felt the New Moon that Bella from the Twilight Saga had felt when Edward parted ways with her. For the first time, I experienced a melancholic year. Though she experienced a different kind of grief, I felt her pain all too well. It was as if she had transmitted her throbbing ache to me through my laptop screen. For a moment, we were connected because we had shared the same emotions, wants, and needs. We were sisters of sorrow intertwined in a love long gone, not knowing when they would come back. Where she had missed a 104-year-old vampire, I had missed a baby that was mine but had never existed.

Based on cyber-shared experiences, I wasn't a lone stranger in having this dream of holding an infant in my hand and then waking up with nothing more than an atom or a speck of dust. It was crazy that my brain could even conjure up such a thought, such a dream. How wicked did something so smart have to be to trick you like that--to make you fall in love with something that didn't exist? This baby that didn't exist in my universe was my New Moon that I missed so dearly day and night. I couldn't stop thinking about her and her little hand wrapped around mine.

I've always said I wasn't a children person because they occasionally gave me the ick. Not to mention, I was constantly reminded why I shouldn't have them, courtesy of the girl with the list on TikTok. While I still stood firmly on my decision not to give birth, but to adopt, there was a part of me that wanted to experience this one thing that bad*ss women were experts at doing, just so I could meet this nonexistent being again.

Though I wasn't as privileged as Bella to sit in my room throughout all four seasons, my mind was adamant about preventing me from losing any recollection of this tiny fake human being. The seasons that literally changed before my eyes and Bella's represented everything else in life that kept on running, walking, laughing, smiling, and breathing while I was still stuck in the past. I was stuck in the past, pondering when I would see her again. While my other brain cells generated energy for life and college, my other half stuck to this one dream I had in January of 2021.

It forbade me from letting go and for that, I suffered a melancholic year. There wasn't a day or month that had gone by where I wasn't thinking about her. Although I was moving on with my life and changing with the season and the time, she was in the back of my mind. I kept her alive in my imagination where I could cuddle, kiss her, and make her laugh. I was healing from a wound that hadn't been treated and was still exposed to everything. I was prone to infection, prone to depression.

I kept asking myself how could I solve this issue. How could I possibly give myself comfort while also moving on? And then I got the perfect idea. I knew how to heal my broken heart and the first thing I had to do was make my dream true. I had to wake it up, make it come alive. I had to act on my aspiration to create things that no one else had thought of, things that people had to sacrifice just to live this dream. I had to feed the hunger inside that begged for me to pour my creativity into others. I had to give birth to this one dream that held me back from living my true authentic life.