The night I found out, I did yoga alone in an empty and dim gym studio. Everything felt “delicious”, as they say, like my blood was thick with energy and I was aware of it circulating through every part of my body. When I’m having a deep yoga-love moment, I respond to nonexistent ultimatums: I would have this baby if not having it meant I could never do yoga again.

I didn’t feel sentimental or suddenly in the company of another human being secreted around inside me. I felt powerful and singular, like there was more of myself to draw from. Later, I had a fit of being frustrated and angry with my body for betraying me, but it was short-lived. Conception is still fundamentally a pretty amazing thing. In this condition, I could move to a place with no other people and, in less than a year, I would have made my own company. It’s stupid to try to pretend it isn’t special, to act like it’s mundane and not miraculous to have this event trying to happen inside my body. You don’t have to be religious or spiritual to think the ways nature works are exciting. You just have to not be a cynic.

Mostly I just wanted to be around other women; I felt so close to my friends who have had abortions even though nothing had happened for me yet. When I called one of them and told her this, she said “welcome to the sisterhood.”

The next morning I was in a class that includes a lot of instructors, so the woman leading the class lets her impulses run wild. We chanted at the beginning, which is not something I’m particularly invested in, but I felt weightless and like my torso was very short, as though my head was sitting just above my pelvis and my spine had evaporated. She had us all move onto another person’s mat to do a mandala before coming back to a seated position and making up a mantra. “Reckoner” was playing so I thought, I am a force. I imagined a glow in the center of my chest, then that same glow simultaneously in my low belly, like ok, you too. I thought for a moment I might cry, not because I was imaging some other person there but because it felt like agreeing to love some unlovable part of myself, like forgiving myself. Then we whispered our own mantra to the person next to us, but in the second person. The woman to my right said, “You are peaceful.”I whispered to the woman on my left, “You are strong.”