Jade McGlynn Poet Spoken Word

An empty name

I didn’t even know you were there.
No test. No countdown. No whispered secret.
No hand on my stomach saying,
“You’re not alone.”
Just me,
Tired, distracted,
Thinking it was stress,
Thinking it was nothing.

And then one night,
Pain like a tide rising inside me.
A loss I couldn’t name
Because I didn’t even know I was holding you.
A grief so strange
It didn’t fit into words,
Because how do you mourn
For someone you didn’t even know existed?

There was no nursery waiting,
No sonogram on the fridge,
No tiny shoes to pack away.
Just a quiet ache in my body and a louder ache in my heart.
Just an empty space where something had been growing,
without my knowing.

I keep telling myself
“I didn’t even know.”
As if that should make it easier.
As if the lack of a name should make the loss less heavy.
But grief doesn’t follow logic.
It sneaks in like a draft
Through a cracked window,
Reminding you of a presence, you didn’t realize that you’d lost.

And I think about you sometimes
A flicker of a maybe-life,
A heartbeat I never heard,
A possibility
That lived inside me for a moment and then slipped away.
You were here, and then you weren’t,
And all I have is the echo
Of what could have been.

No baby clothes.
No due date.
No goodbye.
Just me,
Sitting in a bathroom
Feeling like a crime scene,
Feeling like my own body betrayed me,
Feeling guilty for grieving
When I “shouldn’t” even be grieving at all.

But I’ve learned
There’s no wrong way to grieve.
That even unnamed losses deserve a moment of silence.
That even a heartbeat I never heard left an imprint on mine.

So tonight,
I light a candle for you,
For the life I didn’t know,
But still lost.
And I whisper into the smoke:
I didn’t know you were here,
But I feel you gone.
I didn’t know I was carrying you,
But you carried a piece of me with you when you left.

And in that silence
I hold space
For both of us.

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