Numbers
She never liked numbers. Whether they were alone or accompanied by graphs. Numbers signified for her things she had to do. First it was figuring out what number came after the equal sign or which numbers were hidden by the elusive and unknown x. Then later they appeared with words, always at the end of official letters beside the command “due by”. Sometimes they were displayed in red, like in her bank account.
Certain numbers stayed vivid in her mind, like fourteen weeks, or ninety-eight days, or two days shy of one hundred. That‘s why the second time around, numbers became important to her, the application on her phone stating another week had gone by and with it a tiny brick of fear falling away. Pretty soon she was excited to see the numbers meeting in the middle, twenty weeks behind, nineteen more and some change to go.
Now she sees thirty-four weeks have gone by. But what scares her is the second column, with the second set of numbers, five weeks and five days. The countdown. That fear of numbers has returned and now the obligation tied with them are far more serious then the numbers of her past. She is not deceived by the hearts listed next to those numbers because even though they are laying flat on her screen, appearing one dimensional as they are, she knows by the heavy bulge that weighs her down and the kicks in her belly, that these numbers will give birth to the most important single digit number in her life.
