after I spewed last night N said - I'd like to invent a knitted tunnel, which goes from the end of the bed to the toilet, getting progressively narrower. So when you have morning sickness you can just crawl through there to the toilet and pop your head out at the end and be all snuggy while you throw up. 

I was packing up all our possessions into backpacks for a long trek across country - a migration, because our home was no longer viable. There were too many things, and I couldn't imagine how I would carry them all, but I did keep finding small efficiencies to help - a spot within a pack for the sleeping bag, so I didn't have to carry it separately, and so on. I was mad with N for having so much fussy stuff and so many bags, and that he wasn't there helping. I looked around for him and saw he was playing something called 'Game of Thrones' - a kind of betting game involving a throne- he was trying to get me to calm down and not worry about this, because he had a chance of winning and this was going to help us.

In the next scene I was walking down a town street with GCK, and we stopped at a bar. She started cutting a piece out of the paper menu with a box cutter- her oddness, I thought it was a very G thing to do, inexplicable and disruptive but necessary for her. But the bar owner was watching and there was nothing I could do by then to stop her. He was very angry, so I offered to just pay the replacement cost of the menu, which he said was $30. I gave him a $50 because it was all I had, and he walked off with it, with no intention to give me change. I thought about letting it go but because we were now homeless I knew I had to go into the bar to demand the change. I explained to him - I have nothing, I don't have a home or food, I need the $20 back, it's right, it's what you owe me. He said something like 'I do what I want to, not what I'm told to', while shoving me against a wall, and then the dream became erotic. 

We went to the doctor again, got another scan another bloodtest. There on the scan the little dark dot, making its first appearance. Yolk sac, amniotic sac. There it is. And the tests came back good - a nice rise in the HCG since Friday. Despite the spotting that hints something may not be right, it looks like things are all right.

I still have the two futures inside me, that will continue. But I feel a bit easier.

And then Dermot has died. I remember each of the things he said, each like a cutting still waiting to be planted. There's not so much time. 

That most of what is being made now is a cosy home, a down. Something is growing but it is very tiny. If it's not right it will pass through at the right time. A full, intricate, intimate and barely perceptible conversation is taking place between that tiny entity and the world it's held in - like an orchestra in two parts, working back and forth in hormones and enzymes and thickening blood. They are responding to one another. But it seems that if the embryo dies, it might take days before my body knows? Or my body will know, and wind the hormones down slowly. Let it pass through at the right time, without violence.

It's me who doesn't know. The me who isn't the body, and can only pretend to be the body. My conscious brain doesn't know any more about this than my ear or foot. I see a little bit of blood on the paper. It could mean anything at all.

I knew this guy who was almost unbearably kind and gentle. When his family cat sickened, he waited till everyone was at work and school, and then took it to the vet to be put down. He brought the body home, and curled it up on the end of a bed, then told his family that it had died peacefully in its sleep. He had lots of secrets, and a life-threatening heart condition. 

When I think about the little one inside, and whether it's okay or not, it doesn't make much sense. I feel different but it's ME that feels different. I can't feel anything in there or connect with anything separate. But thinking about it a bit more that is the truth of it. There is nothing in there yet that is separate from me. I feel the making, and that is me, and it's undistinguished from the life that isn't an other. 

Back to the doctor today - bloodtest, and then bloodtest on Monday too. In my head I imagine an obstetrician's having at most half a dozen women in the waiting room, but there are a dozen doctors at the practice, and so there are mazes of corridors and waiting rooms everywhere, all thrumming with nurses and administrators and patients.

I wonder what percentage of patients come out with bad news. Ten percent? Twenty-five? It must be normal for the doctors and nurses, at any rate. My doctor looks like a quoll, or a dunnart. She often has empty afternoons, and sometimes she seems out of her depth, or like she feels guilty.