why this frightened part of me that's fated to pretend?

What makes me love you despite the reservations?
What do I see in your eyes
Besides my reflection hanging high?

He reaches out a hand, warm and gentle, to touch my cold face. He rests it there, against my cheekbone, and looks at me with quiet eyes. Behind his head, the candlelight flickers, and I breathe. I breathe in and out. I can feel every bone in my hip pressing painfully into the wood floor, and the record crackles softly, comforting.

Wide-eyed walker
Do not wander
Do not wander
Through the dawn

Both my eyes are fading
No light in the evening
Planted like a seed in sand and drowned in rain

"You are so beautiful." He says, and then he smiles. The lines around his eyes crinkle. I'm counting calories in my head, but I stop to smile back. His face lights up when he smiles at me, and I am greedy. Those smiles are precious. They are mine. I study his face and try to etch this moment into my memory. I am afraid of forgetting.

After all is said and done I feel the same
All that I hoped would change within me stayed
Like a huddled moon-lit exile on the shore
Warming his hands, a thousand years ago

I walk with others in the yearning to get out
Claw at my skin and gnash their teeth and shout
One of them wants only to be someone you'd admire
One would as soon just throw you on the fire

He brushes his hand through my hair and sighs, satisfied, content. His eyes close and I watch him, his dark lashes, the slight crook in his nose, his lips. The record crackles, stops, the arm returns home with a quiet thump. I untangle the blankets from around my legs and get up to turn it over. Side B.

"I think this is the best birthday I've ever had." He says softly as I return to our nest of blankets on the floor. I kiss him gently and then lay back to rest my head on his arm. The antiquated ceiling fan above us is still, and I think about time. I think about how today he turned twenty-six. How next year we will turn twenty-seven. Then twenty-eight.

Why is life made only for to end?
Why do I do all this waiting then?
Why this frightened part of me that's fated to pretend?
Why is life made only for to end?

I try think about myself as a mother. Of him as a father. I try to picture our child with his curls, my grey eyes. I feel a soft lurch of longing. This child only exists in my imagination, and I am running out of time.

Time. It never stops. No matter how much I beg, how tightly I close my eyes, how much I pretend. 

I cannot picture myself as a mother. I cannot see myself with a child. I can barely take care of myself. Some days I fail even at that. I am not strong. I am not brave. I am broken and selfish and twisted and weak. The thought of it terrifies me, of all the harm I could do. The pain I could cause. I see all the wrong, all the fucked up, all the hurt that lives in this world. I see my own mother's footsteps before me, and I am afraid that I will follow them.

So I close my eyes too. I press my face into his shirt, and he wraps his arms around me and we lay quiet and still until the music ends. He kisses my nose and smiles because he isn't afraid. I smile back because I am fated to pretend.

After all is said and after all is done
God only knows which of them I'll become

(music excerpts taken from Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues album)