FIRST TRIMESTER PSYCHEDELIA: INTRODUCTION

Here’s the deal: I’ve been working on this piece for months. It went from being this pixie stick rush of smiley, manic writing to a 5000-word thorn in my side. I am at my breaking point. It must be released one way or another, so I’m serializing it. Trying to breathe intention into each disparate chunk, praying it comes together in the end. If you never see another installment hit your inbox, just know that I printed it out and burned it, just to watch it die. xoxo

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1 month pregnant. early days, crazy days

Sorry my mouth is dry and I’m rusty at reading aloud right now lol.

“Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear; gestating draws one but deeper into the spiral.” - Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

The eyes of God know nought of cringe. At least that’s what I tell myself when I withhold a personal story in fear of sounding annoying. Consider this: I am the indigo child of my family lore. Nobody outside of a high school gifted classroom or Burning Man wants to admit that about themselves, but it’s true. My mom loves to tell people that there were UFO sightings over Manhattan the night of my conception. She named me Dia like “goddess” and from there, well, all kinds of unremarkable coincidences built a body of evidence.

Like in kindergarten when I insisted our next car would be purple, and my parents drove home in a grape Pontiac Sunfire. That was a big deal among us superstitious Italians. It was also right around the time my mom got super into plants and decorated the house like a headshop, moons and stars adorning every available surface. I’m talking the trim on the walls, the throw pillows, the goddamn napkin holder.

Home was a classroom with all the pre-reqs for being a hippie in the 90s: composting and a silver chain with a dolphin pendant and smoking mids and eating berries and seeds and really loafing about while your house decays, nicotine staining the walls yellow like a giant post-it, a reminder to go down swinging. You know that expression “bun in the oven?” I have a sick feeling I was, indeed, getting baked in the womb. So to have spent the first three months of my own pregnancy trapped in a rainbow prism a la Dark Side of the Moon was a full circle experience.

There’s no use talking pregnancy weirdness, though, without first addressing all the uncanny shit that happened in the months preceding conception. No UFO sightings as far as I know, but I brushed against the reptilian arm of the supernatural with such regularity that I actually thought I was going nuts.

… that was, until I settled into the second trimester and the fog lifted and I realized these occurrences were no more extraordinary than a Barney-obsessed five-year-old pushing for a purple car. That the “reptilian arm of the supernatural” was more some stranger in the grocery store with bad eczema, and everything that happened, merely Life As We Know It.

Nonetheless, I documented everything. I’ll tell you some of it.

May 14, 2024

Andrew and I are walking to get ice cream, discussing the recent Aurora Borealis visibility in Philly. I note that I love the name Aurora, knew a beautiful one as a kid.

“Potential baby name?” I ask, two months married, still happily beholden to generic Yaz.

“That sounds like a made-up stripper name.”

“Have you never seen Sleeping Beauty?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

When we get home, I flop on the couch with my root beer float and start surfing Poshmark. I am in a drooling stupor over kaftans, hoping to find just the right one for a vacation I never take. My vision: gold jewelry, deep tan, long, sleek ponytail. Capacious, ‘60s-style frock that makes life feel like an endless bowl of hazelnut gelato. (Had I known I’d be pregnant within two months, I would have bought one for every day of the week. I still don’t own a kaftan.)

So I click some seller’s profile, and what is she hawking amid Free People dresses and LOFT tops but a collector’s edition Princess Aurora doll.

May 24, 2024

Memorial Day Weekend. I’m off to Myrtle Beach with two girlfriends, Elise and Brie. Elise’s mom moved down there and has made clear the openness of her home; we are always encouraged to “come whenever.” And these are people who mean such things when they say them. Some people leave a key under the mat and wish you a nice Uber ride over from the airport. Some are waiting there before you hit the tarmac with a Mich Ultra in tow, ready to shuttle you straight to the beach. I don’t know about you, but I know my kin.

Anyway, that sticky southern afternoon, we get back from brunch and head to the pool. There is a lazy river at the pool in Elise’s mom’s complex where we float on big tubes and her mom replenishes our Twisted Teas between chapters of Danielle Steele. 

So we’re floating about, discussing those airbrushed t-shirts you get on boardwalks, scheming on a matching trio. Brie says she last got one from Knoebels, the tiny amusement park tucked in the woods back home. Some lady floating by joins the conversation.

“Did you just say Knoebels? I’m from Kulpmont. I went to Bloomsburg University in the ‘80s.” 

Elise’s fiance is from Kulpmont and Brie and I went to Bloomsburg and some last names are thrown out and they know this woman’s entire family and it would make more sense in the grand scheme of the universe if we weren’t talking about hidden Pennsylvania coal towns of under 3,000 people, floating down a lazy river in South Carolina.

June 2, 2024

At the used bookstore down the street from our Philly apartment, like any old Sunday. I’m in a poetry mood. Crouched down, checking out the Yeats selection (never read the guy), my bent knees form a perfect 90 degree angle—something of a chair. 

The elusive bookstore cat takes this long, outstretched step onto my lap from the stool where she was perched, and lays across me like we’ve known each other many moons. Like this is something we do, her and I, every day.

For whatever reason, I reach up and grab a tattered hardcover copy of Anne Sexton’s Love Poems. I notice it’s $13—double the price of most books there, and in far worse condition; the pages might disintegrate between my fingers. I flip it open and there it is: first edition. And on the next page, THIS FUCKING QUOTE:

“One should say before sleeping, “I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.”

From an essay by W. B. Yeats

July 11, 2024

Three days into my 33rd year so I’m already feeling lucky. Angel numbers or whatever. Andrew and I are watching the Steve Van Zandt documentary. What a guy! Of course, I fall asleep within minutes but I glean enough to say, again, what a guy!

I wake up the next morning and get myself a gun take Mousse for a walk, savoring the stillness of the neighborhood we’ll soon leave. The tiny park at the end of Fairmount Avenue was always our turnaround spot. Strolling through for the last time, I peek into the little free library thing. I throw my head back laughing when I spot How to Clean Practically Anything.

In (what I consider) an iconic Sopranos moment, Silvio Dante, played by Steve Van Zandt is reading that very book. I’ve had a screenshot of that image on my phone for five years.

Suppose this is him passing me the torch. What a guy.

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The beautiful thing about altered states of consciousness is they make 15-year-olds of us all. You were never as cool as you were before you got too cool for everything, etc. So it’s nostalgic, to get knocked up and hit the grav bong of progesterone every day, totally paranoid but also delighted by the possibility of like, going for a walk and spotting a nice bird.

One morning I was sitting on the porch having coffee while a woodpecker went to town on the dead stump next door. That might be the most ordinary experience to some, but first trimester has you recounting it to the local barista like, “you’re never gonna believe what I just witnessed.” 

I’d developed what Aldous Huxley called “the sacramental vision of reality” where “everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.” I couldn’t believe the woodpecker as much as I couldn’t believe the mug in my hand as much as I couldn’t believe the porch where I sat; it all held such enormous existential weight that rendered the full experience kaleidoscopic.

I spent my early twenties in a real mess of drugs. Running with fringe whackjobs who, I’ll never forget, once sat around in the rain at Camp Bisco passing a rag dipped in chloroform. To draw parallels with different gestational memories, I wondered if I was reaching, or if I was onto something—if I might look back on those wild years and find a throughline that underscores the present. I mean, who would buy it that the pregnant mind is this bent when pregnant people go to work in offices and hospitals and schools until their water breaks? How could all these people be, ostensibly, tripping their asses off for three months?

The pregnant mind adapts to everyday demands while retaining its altered state, delivering experiences from the shared periphery of lunacy and euphoria. It’s weird, really weird, in fact, to look down at your breakfast sandwich and the sheen of the bagel is dazzling and its hole, a portal. An hour passes and you’ve mapped entire constellations in the crumbs.

To all this, I surrender. Surrender is vital to apprehending the gravity of bringing life into a violent and often colorless world. You lock in. You become The Deity. At last, Dia like “goddess” means something!

It’s no wonder everyone wants to hold the door for you.