August.

Mandy liked it as a name. She said it was sweet and refined and couldn’t be turned into grotesque shorter versions and it belonged to her grandmother. I wasn’t so sure. Let’s think about it I said, but she knew I had already given in.

She hadn’t even been pregnant two months at that stage but already the swell of her belly had started, already a heart had formed inside her and was beating, mimicking the mother she would form such a bond with. I knew I was destined to never fully understand that bond, mother and child, but was content with that. That was the reward Mandy would earn for the months of life support her body would provide. Instead I rewarded myself with plans and dreams, standing at a window with the warm sun on my face and a mother pushing a daughter on a swing, their laughter echoing in my mind.

August arrived in her namesake month, almost four weeks before a doctor with bad breath and worse rosacea had predicted. When complications arose the doctor started yelling and I was sent outside where I stood like a guard at a bank, staring at the cold door, the vault containing all the happiness I had ever planned and wanted for.

Being born in August made you a Leo you know? Your ruling planet, the sun, is the centre of the solar system.

Fitting.

September.

Spring mockingly sings out to the world now. I squint as I watch it unfold from my window, the sun shining carelessly bright in my eyes. The tops of convertibles come down, cleavage reappears, frogs croak on bellies full of unlucky or flippant blow flies, cicadas hatch and flex their timbals noisily amongst blooming jasmine and Butcher birds dive at unsuspecting heads, protecting bald newborns, the reasons for their existence.

Sometimes I think September is the hardest month, privately. I assumed Mandy felt the keenest sorrow in August whose very name we had unwittingly built up to remind us of what we would lose all to soon. But for me it was September that was hardest.
The month we should have celebrated your first, second and third birthdays, the month I should eventually have given you your first glass of wine, the month you should have celebrated your own great milestones long after we were gone.

It was September (you would have been four) when I arrived home; to the darkened house and the cooling bath water a deep crimson against pink flesh, and realised it was the hardest month for Mandy as well.