Today's Isolation Journal prompt, by Georgia Clark, invites us to reflect on a meaningful new beginning. After my miscarriage, I started to doubt whether I wanted to go through the pain of starting a new pregnancy and the risk it entailed. This story is about the day that doubt disappeared.

Early 2016, somewhere between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Smudged mascara on the way to work, per usual. Why do I bother?

The salt leaves taut patches on my skin, and they pulse from the sun and the music and the rolling of the freeway underneath me. 

When our little snap pea, our almost-baby's heart stopped beating, I wondered for a minute if it was for best. Because she would surely be like me. Full of too many feelings and susceptible to everything.

Upset by odd smells and shifts in light. A deep pang in her guts when the music swells, wanting to turn it off or surrender. To be in it. Drink the whole fucking ocean.

Like me, she’ll be emotionally porous. A real mess.

…

But then the traffic halts and I am stuck, for a moment, suspended on the 280. Staring out at the center divider, where a disemboweled cassette tape is tangled and dancing in the weeds. One of so many little mental polaroids that can never be replicated or shared; they are mine. Only mine. 

I don’t want to deny another being a chance to feel all of this. All of the sadness, all of the splendor. To take little snapshots and dive into the music and reel from the weight of it all.