So close to the end of my childbearing life
without children
—if I could remember a day when I was utterly a girl
and not yet a woman—
but I don't think where was a day like that for me.
When I look at the girl I was, dripping in her bathing suit,
or riding her bike, pumping hard down the newly paved street,
she wears a furtive look—
and even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now
she would never come into my arms
without believing that I wanted something.
- Marie Howe