Dear Jenni,
remember when you were at home 3 fridays-ago, in labor? It was just hours before you would give birth to that beautiful child we now call Tallulah. You were still with baby-in-womb, but your body was preparing for her arrival, and your contractions were progressing quickly.
And because you managed, between contractions, to say to your French boyfriend
'I need Froz-Fruit' to which your French boyfriend replied
'What's Froz-Fruit?' to which you said
'it's popsicles', to which he said
'what's popsicles?', he called me up to come over and bring you FrozFruit popsicles. And so as fate would have it, I stuck around as you fell further under the strange spell of child-labor. Because I had never before witnessed a woman go through labor I was curious but mostly terrified and I just wanted to be as helpful as possible, which usually meant I tried to stay out of your way. And yet there you were, laboring right before my eyes, and I was there in the room with you, and you were on your bed moaning, with the indescribable pain of contractions which made you moan like you were bewitched, a banshee, like I'd never heard before... And I watched you, and I felt care and concern and wonder and awe for what you were going through....
...and then I took some of your stuff.
Of all the people I know, I know you best. You have been there in my life for all for of my life, what with you being almost 3 whole years older than me and whatnot. Plus there were those
2 1/2 years we lived together in a studio apartment here in NYC which are fuzzy because of all the wine, but it brought us closer, I'm sure of that. You are more familiar to me than any family member or friend or lover I've known; yet, when you were laboring at your house that Friday, you were going through something so foreign, you seemed to be becoming a strange, other, primal version of yourself; I was there in the room with you but you were mentally and spiritually and painfully
somewhere else. There were questions that only you could answer during that time yet we couldn't even ask you. And so, you were
there, but you weren't
really there.
And also sitting there were your white boots.
I found those boots for just $4 in Denver and gave them to you, because they did hurt my feet. Though only a little. And so while you were in labor, breathing some and moaning some, I looked over at those white boots sitting there, and I looked at you, and I thought 'Oh my goodness, I hope she's going to be okay' and then
'She won't possibly need those white boots this fall season.' I could have been wrong to take boots from you while you were experiencing childbirth, but it felt right at the time. I mean they're really, really nice boots.
And so when we whisked you into the livery car with its plastic-lined seats, and as we forged our path into rush hour traffic —at times on foot— over the
Queensboro bridge towards the hospital where you would give birth, I had those white boots right there with me, close to my heart, in my tote bag.
Oh and also I took your Chanel lip gloss. The salmon-colored, sparkly lip gloss.
In retrospect, with some distance on the events as they unfolded that day, as I look back and realize what you were going through, what with a baby about to come out of your vagina, and the miracle of Tallulh Jane physically unfolding right before our eyes that evening, it may have been wrong to take your stuff (even if I did pay for the white boots with my own $4), while you were doing all that. While you were in the middle of childbirth. And all that...
And so, I'd like to say I'm sorry. I've learned a good lesson.
Here's your lipgloss back.
