Full

I have been having a recurring dream.

In the dream, my breasts are huge and swollen with milk, swollen like my milk has just come in after giving birth. I feel their weight, sense the skin tightening over the hardened and engorged tissue... I sense let-down's stinging path and smell the milk as it soaks my shirt. And I am overjoyed.

Then I wake in the pre-dawn calm, my hot cheek resting against the cool of my sheets. I hear my children breathing in their sleep over the monitor, feel the steadiness of Scott in bed with me. I sense my family.

As sleep falls away I awaken the realization that my breasts are not full. My arms, aching to hold a baby, squeeze my pillow as a silver tear slides from my eye. Disappointment lands like a stone tossed into an empty well, there is no splash this early in the morning, only a cold, hard thud.