On the flight from Las Vegas to Portland, I was reading The Adults by Alison Espach, and I got to a part that I would quote if I hadn’t read it on my kindle and could more easily find it. The protagonist is fifteen, and she is remembering peeing her pants at a funeral and telling her mother about it. She thinks of herself as a burden to her mother, who hugs her, and the protagonist thinks of this moment when she finds it life itself a burden; she thinks of the embrace as the result of love when you confuse someone’s skin for your own. Having just left my mother 38,000 feet and hundreds of miles below, I couldn’t help but cry on the plane.

And then I realized that what I was experiencing was PMS, and that I was going to start my period, just like my phone said I would. And it would be early by a day. Today, it is official. I am officially not pregnant. I’m 37 and a half, and I have not been able to get pregnant while I have been passively trying for three years. In the last year, that trying has been more frantic and deliberate, and I have realized that I don’t ovulate. I also think I have a luteal phase defect. I am hypothyroid, and I am treating it. And with each new menstrual cycle, I feel more acutely the passing of time. I see it in my gray eyebrow hair, my laugh lines, my stray chin whisker. I am losing time.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of numbers. I think about my own mother, who is 63, and who, if I had a child this year, might not see that child marry or have a child. My mother faces her mortality, and the answer to her mortality is that I have a child. The answer to my own mortality is that I have a child. 38 means I will be 56 at graduation. When my imaginary child is my age, I will be 75. I will be allowed to die; I will be passed over in the obituaries as not-so-much-a-shame, not someone with so much life left to live.

I imagine love. I imagine love in my belly. It is warm and yellow and it radiates. Can I will you, my child, into existence with my body? Can my mind convince my body to ooze my genes and hold them safe long enough for him to shoot his genes at mine, and that collision will mix with orgasms and then we will create a person. Why not my body? Why other bodies with meth amphetamines or cocaine or abuse and stress, but not mine? Why another woman’s one night stand but not my real love?

I imagine my grandmother hovering above me, waiting to live again, waiting for me to birth another extension of her into this world. I take back every time I ever said I did not want to live. I did not mean it. I want to live, I want to live, I want to live.

I watch television and I see that commercial, that give thanks commercial about children with cancer, and I wonder who has it worse– the childless or the parents whose child faces death prematurely, and I think I would rather not feel that pain. Then I wonder if my refusal to feel the pain of that immense loss is what prevents me from bringing to life a human being.

I am a scientist. My bathroom is full of my equipment. Test this urine. Spit on this slide. Hypothesize. Diagnose. Supplement and meditate and try again tomorrow. Or in twelve days. Or sixteen. Try not to resent the blood. The blood is life. I need this blood to go into a new body, and then I will love it; I will love that body so hard and I will whisper love, unconditional and warm into that brain, and I will hope against hope that the body I bring into existence with this alchemy of orgasms will not hate itself, will choose love and will love itself too.