Desiderium

Desiderium: an ardent longing, as for something lost

They say when you fall off a horse, the only option is to get back on and keep riding.

Dean isn't sure who they are but he's pretty sure they wouldn't choose to go through the potential pain of losing a child. It's easy to say the best option is to get back up and try again when the fall wasn't life altering to begin with.

If she were here, Stella would be eight months old. She'd probably be crawling and moving further away from a baby and more into being a toddler.

Dean sits alone in his grief. Seth's thrown himself into work, a way to avoid watching the decline of Dean and to hide from the pangs of sorrow threatening to take over.

It's like living with a stranger, Dean realizes. When Seth's there, it's hard to know what's going on. Is he coming? Is he going? What have they become?

When the shadow of grief hangs over a house, it manages to spin the world out of control. Everything you ever knew is challenged. You lose sight of who you are. You lose sight of the person you once loved and what they've become.

Dean walks as a way to clear his mind, especially on the days when he's left to his own devices. He figures he can sit quietly at home and stare silently at the walls, or he can wander around town trying to stop the thoughts from consuming him.

His favorite refuge is the playground down the street from their house. He loves to walk there and sit on the bench overlooking the playground. While he's there, he watches the children playing. In some ways, he's torturing himself by watching the parents play with their children, blissfully unaware that it might be gone in an instant. In other ways, he finds the chaos of the playground soothing.He can live out a different existence, a world that is still graced by the presence of their Stella. A world where he and his husband are happy and still know each other.

He watches the happy couples with their fancy strollers. The toddlers running around, oblivious to the problems of the world. The parents doing their best to get their children to hold their hands just a little bit longer. The entire time he watches, he dreams of what might have been.

Dean sees it all. On his bad days, he sits and watches, silently jealous of all the happy families. He doesn't understand why they get their beautiful babies and their happy families, and he ends up with nothing. It doesn't seem right.

On his good days, he allows himself to imagine what it would be like to be there with their Stella. They'd bought their house when Dean was pregnant. After all, with a baby on the way, they would need more space. The park had been a huge draw because it was close, well maintained, and full of children for their baby to play with.

Would she have a face he would recognize? She had been a beautiful baby- a ton of dark hair, Dean's nose and lips. He'd like to think she would have had Seth's eyes- her eye shape took after him. He'd like to think she would be one of those babies who had no fear. She was always so active in the womb.

Dean wishes he could get through to Seth. They'd barely spent any time together since Seth went back to work. Part of it was the fear of getting pregnant again. If Dean thought he was mentally able to, he'd give himself to Seth and not think twice. He'd tried once but it ended very badly because Dean couldn't shake his fear of conceiving again.

Condoms. Pills. Diaphragms. These were all options to prevent pregnancy but none of them were one hundred percent effective. They'd looked at surgical options but Dean didn't want that yet. He'd tried to convince Seth to have a vasectomy during a darker moment but then came to his senses and realized he might not always feel this way. It wouldn't make sense to do anything permanent because he was hurting.

Because of all of this, he chose celibacy.

He longs for the days before Stella, not because he wishes she'd never lived, but because prior to her he'd never realized a pain like this could exist. He longed for the days when he didn't know what it was like to have your baby die inside of you.

Seth's there but it's almost like he isn't. His brown eyes have been hollow for the last eight months. They share touches and chaste kisses in passing but it's clear that they mean almost nothing. Dean's not sure how to get him back, just another pain that's almost all consuming.

He misses their innocence and longs for it. It's such a strange thought to think about what they had been before the grief took over.

Every so often, Dean will see a young couple, walking hand in hand. It's only by the subtle glow and the way the fabric pools around the middle that Dean can tell their secret.

He wants to reach out and tell them to cherish these moments while they have them. They can all be gone in an instant.

Dean grieves not only for the baby girl that never knew her Dad's love, or the touch of her Daddy, but also for the loss of who they were. The happy couple that never thought they'd live in a world without their baby.

He longs for those days.

-Fin-