It is in tracing the lack of concentration of a work of non-fiction that I begin to understand the source of my own. Her pain at being unable to have her own children magnifies and enhances the grains of sand that stumbled into my oyster.
~

  I never asked him to, and he would never change for me. For over a year, he told me that he loved me. Being told that I was loved glossed over the actions that stated I wasn't. Body language can lie, I would tell myself.
  Nine months after our initial good-byes and six months after a violent and emotional encounter, I got a thirty second notification that he was doing everything I would have ever changed about him, for someone else.
~

  That he might not love her never crossed my mind. That a sense of obligation to the growing life between them might be the only thing keeping him at all was not among my thoughts. Mucus making a pearl from sand: Only this, "he did not love you," remains at the center of the pearl.
  Well intentioned friends, "He thought he loved you." only serve to validate your own feelings of worthlessness.
~

  You imagine how long each set of people has known, how long they have kept this from you knowing instinctively how distraught you will be but vaguely unaware why.
~

  Anger flares in my breast. Third person will not sooth away the irritation I feel at this sand. Only the glaze of time and a very real guilt at my anger will sooth away the imperfections and reveal my pearl.