Limbo

I am in limbo, that place between Heaven and Hell where my unborn wait with me. In the world of limbo, there are dreams. In the first dream, I am back at our house in New Jersey. My father bought it back, some twenty seven years after he sold it, and it has been reconstructed with an indoor pool and expansive rooms with views of Lake Como (limbo dreams apparently have no sense of space). I was excited to go back and live there, to swim in the pool, call up my friend Noelle, go for walks in the woods. But despite this excitement, there was something inside me that said this was all wrong. I had no business being at the house anymore. I wasn't that person anymore, a daughter, a sister, and only these. I should, something said, resist the temptation to back to the past. Next thing I know, I'm riding a bus and Anne Sexton is the driver. She tells me to get off because I've got too much baggage. (I've got too much baggage, Anne?) I take my cart of baggage and roll off the bus into the green grass. I push the cart home, but then everything disappears. Next thing I know, I am at Lollapalooza or some other music festival and one of the musicians makes fun of my Italian heritage. I charge him and we fight, but the fight is more like a dance. I wake up with a horrible, sour taste in my mouth. I am sick again. I am pregnant with triplets.

If you look up the word limbo in the dictionary, you will see that it is a place between Heaven and Hell for the unborn and unbaptized. It's fitting for the triplets and me; they are unborn with respect to earthly life; I am unborn with respect to motherhood. I think we're all afraid. Or maybe they are not afraid and I am; they seem to know exactly what they are doing. But maybe I'm not caught between Heaven and Hell (although at times, it certainly feels like it); maybe I'm caught between the past and the future, between what I have known and what I will know. And what I have known is safe and glorified and what I will know is, right now, terrifying and unreal.