shrinking down my world

just one, which is both a relief and a shock. 2.5mm today and its brain is no longer exposed. its vertebrae are fairly well-developed. it will soon have hands and feet, though webbed. i like the pictures in the book she brought me, like the way it shows the various stages in teensy increments so that i can follow with incredible precision the phase of the terribly tiny guy who is wreaking such enormous havoc on my body. she called them 'alien dogs.' and said they'd give her nightmares. at six, i was highly familiar with fetal faces. i deprive her of so much: grandparents, parents, normalcy, information.
last night, i needed to sleep and sleep and sleep. he came in and i didn't notice until this morning the smell of his body beside mine, the solidity of his strong back against mine. like so many mornings, when i leapt shouting out of bed, i only wanted to crawl back beneath the sheets. i only wanted to spend the day abed with him. but, unlike many other mornings, i mostly just wanted the two of us to sleep. i could have slept much more than i did. all i'm inclined towards is sleeping and eating; which she said was normal. she said she couldn't do anything at all, even in the first trimester. she said she would go to the grocery store and that would be it for her for the day. now, she said, in the second trimester, she can't do anything for more than ten minutes without wanting to lie down. she said it'll be better for me, because there's just the one, but that it will still be tough. she said it's hard for women who are used to doing everything for themselves to resign themselves to the fact that there's motivation and energy for very little once they're pregnant. i'd forgotten all these nuances. it has been so long.
i'm irked already with 34 weeks to go. and this is entirely elective for me. poor him. poor her. i don't know how they'll tolerate me with the nausea and the drowsiness/incapacitation, the rotting face and the incessant hunger. i knew all this, in the abstract, i just thought i'd deal with it better, less superficially. i have all these second-order desires about the person i could be.
i dreamt him slaughtering a terracotta cow moose in the backyard of a house i suppose i owned, which was filled with a medley of bizarre animals, probably inspired by his statement about my animal loving. i dreamt him the way he once was, laughing, free-spirited, not defensive, indoctrinated, brash. i dreamt him with the gorgeously crinkled, smiling eyes that used to be the object of our cruelty: gremlin eyes, bird turd, la nariz. we were ruthless. no wonder he's grown to hate me. i don't know how i could expect otherwise. abuse someone long enough and they're bound to despise you. maybe die overseas doing so.
i am communicating poorly. i am not connecting or, really, even attempting to connect. i am recoiling into myself, rolling solo on the waves of remembrance. because i imagine the people in my world will quickly tire of my recurrent revelations. times and places and people who were never a part of their experience of me. even so, i am shutting down and that's not healthy. i need to get to a different place.
and i need to tell them, stop hoping for their indirect discovery. i need to transcend the rejection. and so much worry. maybe i'm the one in need of medication, not her.
i want my throat less constricted and bilely, my brain less addled by anxiety, my heart less willing to eagerly establish unrealistic, unfair dreams about us.
i need my feet to touch the ground and find it solid.

i need to read the fucking paper. and digest. he tried to set me straight and, in some ways, he was right: the world is bigger than my bubble.