For As Long As Turtles Live

Our relationship might crack as we build two babies, but turtles don’t rush.

My gay house is her body. Tall. I call it beautiful. She laughs and says, “No, squiggly.” Beautiful, I say. “Squiggly,” she insists. Beautiful squiggly. We make love every time we see each other. Her body becomes my home. The walls that help protect me, warm me. We will love each other for as long as little turtles live.

Her back combines with mine to build a home for the mushy hurt of our guts. A safe place to scream, to come, to cry. We fence our fingers together.

Then, the sperm enters her and the nausea begins. We go to Santa Fe. She is maybe six weeks pregnant. I kiss her. I try to coax her into body interest on this baby moon, but her tummy rumbles. Two fetuses suck her blood and marrow. She is nauseous every second of every day. Hyperemesis gravidarum, the doctors say. I massage her swollen feet every night. We listen to two little heart beats in her belly. She cannot tolerate any touch other than the foot massage. She is amazing. She cannot hold me, kiss me, fuck me. She can’t even hug me because my body smell, once attractive, is now stale.

While she builds bodies, I run the household—all the dog poop, cat shit, dishes, cooking, shopping, house repairs, car maintenance.

I try to jump over the dog bag, the dishes, the grocery lists, endless to-dos, to reach her. To traverse this gorgeous belly between us. But she is latent. Her eyes dull with sick. My legs are too scrawny to hold up our house. Her back too weighted down to lift either of us. Our house is cracking even as we build babies. I have lost my home, at least the one I had before.

Her body lives in the finished attic. She works via phone by day. She watches comedies at night. She descends to the main level just for food and toilet. She has become the woman in the attic, and I have lost her.

I meditate about temporality, the passing of time, metamorphosis. Will she come back? My gut knows that even if she does survive this constant pain and illness, she will not be the same. We will not be the same. Will our backs still puzzle together to make a strong roof?

She says that every now and then, when she awakens, for a split second, she does not feel sick. She does not feel heavy with twin bodies pressing on her insides. She feels relief. I wish without words that we can have two blinks for the old us.

It has been thirty-eight weeks. Baby A takes more than twenty-four hours to show herself to the world, while Baby B, under some distress, needs big pushes guided by three nurses. My wife brings him to the outside world in eleven minutes. She has run two marathons.

Two babies have cracked our hearts.

We bring the babies back to our depleted abode. Our backs don’t quite fit together as they once did. Our spines need extra support that neither can give. There are little gaps. We try to force our shells back to snug. But turtles don’t rush. We just let the gaps show. We let the light in.