appropriate today and everyday; or in which this was a theme of this year—universal excerpts from journaling: june 2009

I realized today that I have been holding onto so much hurt and disappointment and pain. Today I let that go. I know that I have been difficult in loving you as well as in allowing you to love me. I haven’t opened myself up to you in fear of being hurt. I have put you through the wringer and tested your limits and your love. I’m starting to realize that that’s not how you trust someone. I want to give all of myself to you, more than I have with you or anyone else.

I’ve been thinking about it tonight, lying in my bed, and I’m not sure if love is really unconditional. There are always conditions that come with loving someone, signs we look for that make us pull away before we’re hurt. The thing is, I’m ready to be hurt again. That’s the thing about conditional love, the right person makes you want to throw away all the hurt and begin again; set fire to the house that has surrounded your heart for so long and watch it burn down, with the hope that this new dwelling will be the one that will let your heart rest easy. You are that home, I’ve known for so long and yet I’ve run from the answer, boarding up the windows that would let you see inside me. Now I know and I can say it.

I adore you. I am amazed at the fact that random cells formed you into the man that you are today, a coincidence of genetics which has shaped you into my missing parts. We are fully formed without each other and yet we fill holes we didn’t know existed in ourselves. You challenge and encourage me and make the world come alive with possibility. Every so called love I’ve had has made me feel trapped, you only make me feel free. Darling, we are exhausted and beautiful, and we are fuller for loving each other. I was a complete person before I met you, but now I am a better one.

Nelson

My pre-kindergarten class was all atwitter with the afternoon’s activity: Stone Soup story time and an actual party with stone soup. As four-year-olds, we were psyched. We had heard the story earlier in the week and when we found out we were going to actually make stone soup, our jaws dropped. This is the kind of thing that kids live for, after all. That morning our teacher, Miss Patty, gave each of us an ingredient just like in the story and we lined up eagerly in our classroom’s small kitchen. She let each of us take our turn dropping our ingredient into the soup; my ingredient was paprika, I shook just the right amount in. Miss Patty smiled approvingly at me and I felt smug. We all sat on the story time rug and held our mugs of soup happily. Our class had become the village in the story and now we sat to hear the story once again, victorious.

I sat next to my friend Jillian and we sipped our soup daintily. We giggled and made sure our dresses covered our criss cross applesauce legs. That’s indian style for you plebs out there. I wore a red jumper with a white collared shirt underneath and shiny patent leather Mary Jane shoes with those white socks with the tiny lace trim on them. My hair was probably half up half down as my mom always styled my hair this way when I was a kid, saying that it showed off my face and it prevented it from becoming a mess. Jillian and I were trying to identify the ingredients in our mugs when I noticed that someone had sat down next to me.

Nelson.

He had dirty blond hair and that kind of round face that only came from baby fat, or beer as I later found out upon viewing frat boys. Nelson was always nosy on the playground, trying to break into the clubhouse we fashioned in the bushes where we girls were trying to have a serious game of house. He had really blue eyes and would always stare at me when Jillian or some other friend pushed me on the swing. I looked at him sitting next to me for a second and turned up my nose at him. I chattered away with Jillian until Miss Patty quieted us down for the reading of Stone Soup.

We all sat riveted. The only noise besides Miss Patty’s voice were the tiny slurps and sips of our soup. The story was even more magical than we remembered. Miss Patty told the story with such grace, her blond hair flipping around as she moved her face in specific expressions; her voice was soft and scary and gruff and silly all at once. She was a fantastic teacher, it was truly her calling. We stared at her and at the picture book in her hands as she turned the pages.

I put my mug down in front of me and pulled my jumper skirt over my tiny knees. Entirely focused on Miss Patty and Stone Soup, I barely noticed Nelson stand up next to me. His small hands unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants and he dropped both his pants and underwear. He got really close to my face with his penis and looked at me.

“It’s for you!” he half shouted at me as all of his boy glory looked me directly in the eye.

I had seen my dad’s penis before, accidentally catching him coming out of the shower, but this was the first penis I had seen that wasn’t erased by even my child mind’s creepy parental situation filter. I couldn’t look away, my eyes glued to the tiny member in front of me. Of course, now it seems tiny but at the time, I was convinced an anaconda was coming for my face. I stared, terrified and awed by this brazen behavior and then he inched a centimeter closer.

I screamed.

The next few moments seem blurry in my memory but all I know is that as soon as I screamed, mayhem broke out in the classroom. Jillian, everyone in the room really, looked over and began to scream as well. Miss Patty stood up and tried to calm everyone down as all the kids dropped and threw down their mugs of soup and tried to get away from the tiny child penis. I was glued to the floor, trapped by the power of this moment; here I was at age four with my first dick in the face. It was a big day to say the least. I continued screaming as tears began to flow and I only moved when Miss Patty rushed over and picked me up in her arms. She told Nelson to put his pants back on and to wait for her at the art table. She sat me down in the chair she’d been sitting in and reassured me that everything was okay and to just hang tight.

Over the next few minutes, Miss Patty somehow rounded up all of my classmates back onto the rug, cleaned up soup spills, and spoke quietly to Nelson for a bit. Everyone was back on the story time rug and Nelson was sitting in the timeout corner. Miss Patty came back to her chair and sat me on her lap as she continued to read Stone Soup to the class. I was still slightly shaken from what had happened but I settled into her lap and helped her turn the pages as she read. I knew Nelson was in the corner but I tried to avoid looking at him. I felt him staring at me but I kept my eyes on turning the pages for Miss Patty.

Then Miss Patty shifted me on her lap and moved the book from one side to the other. Now I had no choice but to look at Nelson. He was looking at me with a sort of nonchalant interest, as if he were enjoying making me squirm. I looked him in square in the eye and he looked back. He half smiled at me and despite my horror at what had happened, I was slightly charmed. Mad at myself, I turned slightly to look back at Miss Patty. The story had ended. Miss Patty asked the class questions about what they thought of the story now that we had finished our soup activity and everyone chattered away at her.

I sat quietly swinging my feet slightly and looked at Nelson out of the corner of my eye. I was confused by what had happened but some part of me was curious as to why he wanted to show specifically me his penis. Nelson stared at the wall only to look at me every so often. I thought he was weird and gross but some part of me liked him for what he had done. When I told my mom what had happened, I once again cried and put on a really good show of being really upset. I ignored Nelson at school and we circled each other warily. He was always looking at me in the kind of way men look at me now when I wear something low cut. He was four but he was the first guy to ever really want me.

Once the surprise had passed, nothing but wonder remained. I was much older the next time I had a penis in my face but the reactions of both parties involved were much the same as when I was four; he was single minded in his pursuit and lusty, I was scared yet enthralled.

That time, I wasn’t the one who screamed.

Between the click of the light and the start of the dream

When I was a kid, it took me forever to fall asleep. Unlike now when I happily doze for nine or ten hours at a time, I hated sleeping. I would lie in my bed and look around at my room, all my belongings, categorizing everything as I tried to relax. I counted sheep, sang songs to myself, made up stories, watched tv. Nothing worked. I pulled the covers up to my chin and started thinking.

There was something about night time that was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. I was scared of Beetlejuice and alligators and every night as I was desperately trying to sleep, I would imagine Beetlejuice reaching from under my bed (that’s where he lived, of course) and pulling me down into the dark belly of the Underworld to make me his bride in a red wedding dress. Obviously, I had read too much Greek mythology even as a kid and imagined myself to be Persephone eating her pomegranate seeds and whatnot down in Hades. I imagined worms crawling out from under his dirty suit as he tried to kiss me. This was, of course, all happening as we were surrounded by hungry alligators. I was a nervous kid.

When these thoughts started to consume me, I’d rub my eyes really hard. I laid on my back and rubbed my eyes hard, the delicate skin of my eyelids pressing against my eyeballs until I saw every color imaginable. It looked like swirls of dark purple and gold, a more heightened version of the slides of galaxies that I had seen at science museums. I felt like I was floating through my own private portal to the Milky Way, my arms pushing stars and tiny planets out of the way as I kicked my legs. With my eyes closed, there was plenty of air to breathe in space and I took deep breaths as I moved through the galaxy behind my eyes.

I would rub my eyes with my small palms for what seemed like ages until I would open my eyes finally and see a burst of tiny spots of light in my line of vision. It was beautiful. It felt like my secret light show, my prize for staying up longer than kids were supposed to. I would stare until the lights disappeared and the only thing I could see was my night light in the corner.

I started to think again. My mind was and is always working but at night, it became a net for all of the worst possible thoughts. I thought about my parents dying, my dog who had died when I was younger, math tests, how awkward I felt in my body that got taller everyday, who I would sit with at lunch, whether I would go to a cool classmate’s birthday party, how many fouetté turns I could do in my audition for The Nutcracker, what was going to happen to me in my life. The worst thoughts were when I got to thinking about existence. Why am I here? Do I exist at all? What am I? I would stare at my hands in the dark and wonder if I was just a creation of some other mind, a small piece of a huge puzzle. I’d think myself into a corner until I finally, finally collapsed asleep.

Sleep is easier now, maybe life is more tiring when you’re an adult. The worries are bigger at the very least. Now I worry about getting into grad school, whether I’ll have kids someday, what kind of person I’m going to end up with, what the economy will be like in a few months, the anxiety of having to call people I don’t know, whether my friends and I will stay as close as we are, whether I’m making the wrong choices and fucking up my life. I can’t even devote enough time to these as I should for proper worrying. I’m just tired. I get into bed at night and I black out as soon as my head hits the pillow. I just think all day long now, small amounts of worry piled into a full day. I don’t know if those thoughts ever leave an overactive mind; it’s hard to shut off. It’s hard to know what to worry about sometimes.

I rub my eyes in bed and the stars fall into my hands; shimmering swirls of charcoal mascara and metallic olive and eggplant eyeshadow smudges stay on my fingers as I watch the light show and wish I was only worrying whether or not to sit with Jennifer Healy at lunch. My hands are as full as my mind.

Morning

When I was little, I remember my mom giving me a bath in the morning before school. It was always so early that it was still dark out. She only ever turned on a few lamps in the morning, hating the harsh glare of brighter lights so early. The hot bath would always wake me up slowly and I enjoyed scrubbing my tiny elbows and knees and feet. She would wash behind my ears and wash my hair for me since I always got shampoo in my eyes at that age. After she rinsed me clean, she would hold out a huge soft towel for me and wrap me up in it in her arms. She dried my hair with another towel, rubbing at my wavy hair. I’d always laugh as she dried me roughly pretending to be a drying machine and using a robot voice to talk.

I’d wait for her to give me the look and when she nodded, I’d run from my bathroom to my parents’ room and jump into her bed. I rolled around in her sheets, and curled up under the covers in my towel. I loved being in bed after taking a bath, it felt so wonderful against those sheets, and let me tell you, my mother had nice sheets. She would come in after a few minutes with a cup of coffee for herself and modified soy cafe con leche for me. Climbing into bed next to me, we would turn on the tv and watch the news together. We sipped our mother-daughter coffee beverages and she would explain to me the things going on in the world that I didn’t understand: natural disasters, murders, rapes. She was always very honest about these things and to this day I thank her for it. She lied about the important stuff like Santa. I believed in Santa until I was 12 because my mom was so good at keeping up the ruse year after year. She lied in order to keep magic alive and make things beautiful for me but she never let me become detached from reality.

Soon we would get up and she would dress me in my Catholic school jumper and we’d make our way out of the house for the day. I loved our drives to school in the morning but nothing could compare to the early mornings in the soft haze of pink lamplight. Waking up early with her felt like our secret, it felt like we were calling back to a different time when the time before the sun rose was sacred for people. Every morning, I roll around in my sheets now by myself and I wish my mom was about to walk in with coffee for the both of us. I hate the lines adulthood draws between child and parent; baths are lonely without robot voices.

Part deux: Letters we tuck into drawers and never send; a universal letter to lovers.

I wrote this during the time period when I wasn’t speaking to the boyfriend this summer. I hadn’t wanted to talk for a few days but there was miscommunication and we didn’t talk for almost six weeks. The day I finally felt like my heart couldn’t take anymore sadness and I felt so, so depressed, I wrote the following:

Most days, I don’t think of you. I go through the day unaware of your existence in the universe, filling the familiar aches with books and new records and jogs and new faces. My brain is smart and tries to fool me for a while. For a minute, it almost seems as if you never happened at all until the tiniest thing sets me off. Memory is a cruel thing and sharpest when it needs not be. I check my voicemail and hear a saved message from you, one of you imitating Tom Waits to make me laugh when I checked it after class or work, and I feel my throat close up. Tears fill my eyes and I realize that this will be the last voicemail I ever receive from you; this one doesn’t even have an i love you in it, it’s just pure Tom Waits impersonation. I end the call and rub my eyes.

I go about my day and put in my headphones as I shop. Shuffle plays me a song that you put on a mix for me and it all begins again. I cry in Target in between the hair care products and the moisturizer and I realize that nothing is over, that my heart, my habits have not caught up with my ever-wise brain. I’m never alone now except when I’m about to fall asleep and I hope each night that I’m so exhausted that I just crash in to my sheets and black out, a pile of tired bone and sinew. I want to shut off my functions so the thoughts in my head don’t reach the rest of my body. I don’t sleep, I’m unconscious for a few hours a night.

There is something about the absence of someone after a breakup or the end of a romantic entanglement that is felt so deeply, I don’t understand it. Even in long distance relationships, the constant comfort of having someone so near to you emotionally leaves a hole inside you. There is a heartwrenching listless feeling that comes and you wander through the day, half of a person. I feel like every time I love someone I give them a part of myself and when things end, I hobble around for a while, missing limbs or an eye, a victim in the the long war we call love. The only comfort is that eventually the parts of themselves they gave to me grow over my wounds and I become a patchwork quilt of my past loves. We’re never truly individuals as we are a product of the love and people that shape us. It’s the only thought that makes me feel better as I try to forget. I’m trying to forget for now so that soon I can remember and be happy for the love of ours that was.

You are weaved into the fibers of my soul in a way that I cannot describe and I love you still for every breath you take, even if those breaths are no longer for me.

As it turns out, he was still reading my tumblr, and he saw it and commented the following:

I saw this late on a Thursday night and I felt so many things. I was pissed off and sad and confused, and so I drank myself into a whiskey-soaked stupor and listened to the saddest music possible and went to bed. The next morning I woke up with a splitting headache and emailed him some lines from an Anne Sexton poem that felt appropriate to us (And I don’t know, don’t know, if we belong together or apart, except that my soul lingers over the skin of you and I wonder if I’m ruining all we had, and had not) and after some difficult conversations, we found that, you know, it was still there and wanted to do this for real. I was ready to do this being an adult in a relationship thing for real and here we are.

It took me a long time to break down my walls, I had been building them for years and by the time Gabe came around, they were way above my head and I could barely make out things that were trying to get in. I’ve been vulnerable now with him, most importantly with him, but just in general in my life now. I’m letting things and people in and it seems that the more I let in, the more I get. There is always the chance that anything in my life could go terribly awry and fall apart but what’s the point of not even trying? I’d rather feel the cool wind against my skin as I leap off the precipice than to stand back and watch everyone else jump and live without me. Living is good, feeling is good. Love has become a constant part of my life rather than an idealized concept in my mind as I learn to let it all in and just be.

And in the darkened underpass

“So that’s why homosexuals are sinners, class.” My theology teacher, Mrs. Cochran, closed her illustrated children’s Bible and set it on her lap.

I sat on the floor in front of her with the rest of my third grade class and felt confused. Mrs. Cochran had just told us the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and how all the men who had had relations with each other were destroyed. I knew relations meant sex and not your cousins or something because my mom was always honest and had explained this to me when I was younger. She also said something about Lot’s wife being turned into a salt shaker when she turned around; I may have misunderstood this.

“Mrs. Cochran?” I raised my hand as I spoke. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“What do you mean, Anaïs?” Her face looked tight and annoyed. I always asked a lot of questions in theology class.

“I just mean that not all homosexuals are bad, Mrs. Cochran.” I smoothed my plaid jumper over my knees as I sat indian style.

“Well, they may be nice now and then but they are still sinners in the eyes of God, and doomed to the fires of hell if they don’t repent,” she said.

“My uncle’s gay and he’s not a sinner so obviously the story is wrong.” I stared at her sharply.

“If he repents then he will be forgiven and be filled with God’s love again.” She gripped the Bible in her white fingers.

“He doesn’t need to repent, he can’t help who he is.” My eyes started to water as I got angry.

“There’s no need to get upset, Anaïs, as long as he turns away from his lifestyle of sin.”

“He can’t do that if he wanted to, and he wouldn’t need to even if he could.” I was crying now, that sniffly, choking kind of crying that every child is an expert at.

“Well, there’s no need to cry, of course he can.” She looked annoyed at my tears.

“He died last year so he can’t.”

I cried harder thinking of the last time I saw my uncle in a hospital bed, his 6’2” frame withered down to about 100 pounds, Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his neck and hands. He used to pick me up and swing me over his head and now, just a few years after that he was dead. His was the first funeral I ever went to. I remember they played In My Life by the Beatles at the service and my mom cried as she sang softly along to it while holding my hand. I knew he had died of AIDS but I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant then. I just knew that I had lost the man who would read me books when he babysat and who would let me spin in his big leather chair when I’d visit him at his office.

He had had a partner that I knew when I was little and for some reason, my mind never thought this was weird or odd at all. I had always made my girl dolls marry each other and my boy dolls marry each other and it wasn’t that weird. It was who he was so how could it be wrong? I sat on that classroom floor and really tried to imagine how someone just being who he or she was could be a sin. It made no sense to me and it still doesn’t. The rest of the class was quiet and Mrs. Cochran cleared her throat.

“Well, I’m very sorry about that, Anaïs. Hopefully he asked God for His forgiveness before he passed on,” she said in a nervous voice.

“He didn’t have to ask for anything because he didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just who he was and he was a better person than you’ll ever be.”

My blood boiled and I felt my face get red. I could hear my heart in my ears over the gasps of my classmates. Mrs. Cochran’s face became very tight and she looked like she wanted to slap me. There are few times in my life that I have been as angry as I was at that moment. Usually when I had to go to timeout during theology class, she would point to the corner but this time she stood and grabbed me by the arm and dragged me over to the corner where there was a table and chair. She sat me down in the chair and looked me straight in the eye.

“You will sit here until you understand what respect means, young lady. Hopefully you will lose that attitude before it’s too late for you to repent as well,” she said before turning on her heel and walking back to the rest of my chattering class.

That’s the moment I knew. People laugh when I say I lost all my faith in religion when I was 8 but that was it. I could not buy into something that said that who my uncle was at his core was a sin. No, it was not a sin. It’s just who he was, the end. I sat at that table and cried with my head resting on my arms while the rest of my class blindly listened to more Bible stories. I told my mom what had happened when she picked me up from school and she had some words with my teacher and tried to convinced me to not start trouble but it was no use. I had opened my mouth to ask a question and would continue to question not just religion, but everything; my brain was and is permanently powered on.

I am a baptized and confirmed Catholic and I’m part Jewish on my dad’s side. I was raised in the Catholic Church and went to Catholic school from kindergarten to my senior year of high school. Today, I have no religion. That does not mean I don’t have spirituality but I do not believe in organized religion as a whole. I respect the beliefs of others and do not push my views into anyone’s face thus I appreciate not having others’ beliefs pushed into my face.

There’s no rule book. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 22.5 years on Earth so far, it’s that having rules is pointless. Something or someone will always come out of nowhere and make you realize that a situation isn’t black and white, it’s gray. There’s not a right answer for everything and even if there is, everything is relative. Your right answer might not be my right answer.

I can understand the appeal of religion. Rules are comforting, restrictions and limits tell us how far we can go and what we can and can’t do. They’re comforting because we don’t come with instructions. We are born and that’s it, we’re flying blind. I wake up every morning and have a brief moment of terror where I realize that I have no idea if I’m living my life how I should be living it. I wonder if I’m making wrong choices when I realize that even all my wrong choices have led me to be the person I am today and I like that person a whole lot. I like who I am today and that’s all that matters.

I can’t think about tomorrow. Obviously, I do and we all worry now and then about the future but I can’t let myself dwell on what will and won’t happen on this earth or in any heavenly beyond. I don’t know what happens after we die but I can’t live my life for what’s coming instead of what’s going on right now. I can’t and I won’t live in fear of something I’ve never seen and don’t know exists for a fact when there are things in front of me that I know exist. The tangible things and people that fill my time and make the lonely experience of living that much better, that much easier.

I miss my uncle a lot sometimes. I only knew him as a little girl and I wish I had known him as an adult so he could see how I had grown up. He was in my life for only almost 7 years and in that time, he made a huge impact on who I was to become. He made me reach out to AIDS activists in doing fundraising work with them. He made me aware that love doesn’t just exist between a man and a woman in the confines of marriage but in many ways with different kinds of people. His very existence made me question the things presented to me by adults. He made me realize that someone’s character is not made up of the labels that people categorize you by but of the people you affect and the fears you overcome to live whatever fucking life you want. He made me brave when someone called my ex-girlfriend and I dykes as we walked down the street holding hands. He made me strong when I’ve sat holding friends who after coming out to their parents found out they would no longer have a place to live. His presence and then his absence shaped the essence of who I am now.

I don’t believe in religion because I don’t need to believe in anything that tells me a good man is in hell right now because of who he wants to love. If there is a God, I don’t think he would judge anyone for who they are. The truth is, I don’t care if there’s a God or not because I am full of so much from every person I have encountered and loved and fucked and hated and laughed with and gotten high with and lived my life with that I’m okay here on earth without him. He can keep heaven and I’ll keep the ground beneath my feet and the people in my arms and heart and all those questions right here on my lips. I’m having a great time on Earth and when it ends, it will have been a good life, just like my uncle’s.

Makin’ whoopee

In my opinion, there are three different kinds of sex:

1. Having sex
2. Fucking
3. Making love

I have found that you cannot have all of these types with most people. The majority of the time, I’ve just had sex with the people I’ve dated. It feels good, there’s an orgasm, the end. Nothing fancy. With some of these people, there has been fucking. Serious dirty, perverted, bruises-the-next-day fucking. I’ve always said that if I really love someone, I want the shit fucked out of me. I can’t fuck just anyone but with the right chemistry, it’s perfection.

Making love is odd for me. I used to hate the term. Making love. It just sounds so Pollyanna. Like, why are we pruding up my sex? I have found though that making love is very distinct and I say this in a completely serious way, magical. It’s not all flowers and romance, it’s highly sexual and beautiful. Fingers laced, skin melting together, merging at the hips as you fuck (in a romantic way, of course), it can be lovely.

It’s rare that you find one person that you can all do three with. That’s like, the Holy Grail of sexual experiences. Someone who will take a riding crop to you while you’re tied to a chair and then murmur that you are his only love against your neck as you come together. I don’t mean to imply that sex is the most important aspect of a relationship but I think it might be the most beautiful. Sex is a physical expression of all the things you can’t find words for. I have my own love affair with words and use them exquisitely but when it comes to the man I love, I want nothing more than to wake up in the morning, climb on top of and straddle him, and press against him and kiss his sleepy mouth, moving my hands over his body until he knows that I wake yearning only to tell him how much I adore him with my body. Our bodies could have a conversation for years in this way, fingers discussing politics with skin, lips talking about what was on tv last night with your tongue.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have all three with the same person and it will be glorious. I promise. If not, find someone who can fuck you harder than you’ve ever been fucked. This is golden advice.

Love Notebook #6

While you were still at work, I went to your house after school let out at 2:30 to wait for you. I had the key you had given me and I parked in your gravel driveway and walked up to the door with the hibiscus flowers growing around it. I unlocked the door and let myself in. Your wood floors felt flexible beneath my shoes and I put my bag down on the couch. I kicked off my shoes but left my socks on. It was one of the few cold days in Florida and I could feel the wind creeping in through the unsealed edges of your windows. I went into your bedroom and pulled your U of Guelph hoodie from the back of your closet. I slid it over my head and pushed my hair out of my face and into a ponytail. Your sweatshirts were always huge on me and I liked to tuck my arms inside while wearing them and hold onto my arms the way you did when we napped together.

I stepped into the hallway and walked to the kitchen. From the first time you took me to your house, I had always felt at home. It was unlike the cold, ornate house I grew up in and quieter and more still than the place I considered home, my grandparents’ house; it was warm and small and I knew every corner and nook to it almost instantly. I poured myself a glass of sweet tea from the pitcher I had left you in the fridge before I went to school, before you went to the library. I sat with my feet up at your table and sipped my tea as the blue-tinted afternoon sun filled the window. I had helped you pick out the yellow curtains that hung around that window. You could care less about how it looked but you were excited about my desire to leave my mark in your house. The light that filtered through the curtains was cool and unlike regular Florida sunshine. I shivered and took my tea into the living room.

I set down my glass on the coffee table and walked to your bookshelves. They were built into the wall just like mine were at home and filled with more books than most people could ever imagine even skimming through. You had read them all. You brought them from Guelph, from your parents’ house in Wisconsin, and now they sat on the shelves you had painstakingly hammered into existence. You dusted your books regularly, you kept them more pristine than your appearance. They were exquisite. I ran my fingers over each one, my eyes quickly reading the spine of each one. I knew the moment I saw these books that I would be yours.

These books said more about you than your eyes or your hands or your words did. They told me that while your brothers were wrestling in the living room as kids, you were hiding on the back porch turning the pages of The Portrait of Dorian Gray as fast as your eyes moved across the page. They told me that you read things not assigned in sophomore English while waiting for your mom to pick you up from track practice. They told me that you had to buy a second copy of The Poetics of Space after you dogeared and highlighted it into oblivion while writing your senior thesis. They told me that you knew more than most people did and that those people would probably never learn about the worlds that lived beneath your floppy blond hair. This was my first step into those worlds. Every talk over breakfast, every whisper before we fell asleep at night, every conversation as we passed sections of the newspaper to each other on the couch, they just showed me another glimpse of the things I wanted to know about you and about life.

I pulled Life Studies by Robert Lowell off the shelf and made my way down the narrow hallway. I was still freezing and grabbed my coat out of the hall closet; it had been in there since we had gone to New York for the weekend two months before. I slipped it over my shoulders and pulled the hood up on my head. It had funny fake fur around the collar. I hated it until you said I looked like I should be kissing Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago.

I went into the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain. I stepped into the dry tub and sat back with my book. You always laughed when I did this but I loved being fully clothed and laying against the cool surface of the tub. I opened the book to “Skunk Hour” and began reading. I made it through a few poems when I heard the front door open and close.

“Honey?” You called to me, your voice deep but sunny.

“In here,” I said. You knew exactly what “in here” meant.

Your footsteps made the floorboards creak as you came closer to the bathroom. I heard you round the corner and then you stood in the doorway. I saw your lean runner’s legs in their jeans first and then looked up to see you smiling quietly at me. You leaned against the door frame and crossed your arms.

“Come here often, miss?” This was the game we always played when you found me reading in your bathtub. You were almost too tall for the door frame, the tallest man I had been with up to that point.

“Now and then.” I turned my fur-framed face to you. “It has a nice atmosphere and the drinks are swell, sir.”

“Are they now?” You walked in and lowered the toilet lid and sat down, your forearms resting on your knees as you leaned towards me. “What are you having?”

“Scotch and soda, it’s what we ladies drink.” I put the book down on my thighs and leaned forward, my arm on the edge of the tub.

“Ladies? Where?” You looked from left to right as I giggled. “I thought you were just an eskimo girl in that coat.”

“Well, it’s drafty in this bar. What else could I do?” I smiled at you and placed my hand on your arm. “Give us a kiss.”

You stood up suddenly and held your hand up. I protested as you backed out of the bathroom quickly.

“One second, one second,” you shouted as I heard you rummaging in your bedroom.

“Fine,” I sighed, laying back against the tub again.

You came back two minutes later with your camera in your hands and a shit-eating grin on your face. You kicked off your shoes and climbed into the tub, standing over me.

“Now,” you said, looking through the viewfinder. “Smile for me, eskimo girl.”

“I hate you.” I tried to keep a scowl on my lips but I couldn’t help smiling as you put the shower curtain over your head like an old time photographer.

“Look at the birdy, little eskimo girl.” You waved your hand above your head as you snapped photo after photo of me laughing at your shtick.

“Are you done yet?” I reclined in the tub and looked up at you.

“No.” You kept taking photos as you knelt awkwardly over me, your long limbs splaying out of the tub. You took a photo of just my face as I smiled a real smile at you. “Now, I’m done.”

You leaned down and gave me my kiss. Your face brushed against mine and against the fur, your tongue darting inside my mouth. I opened my eyes while we kissed and saw yours were open as well. Your eyes were so green at that moment as you looked into my brown ones. I still haven’t met anyone with eyes as green as yours. My hands found their way around your neck as we kissed lazily in the tub. You pushed back the hood to kiss my earlobe.

“What are you reading today?” You bent your chin to kiss my fingers that seemed to be made for your mouth.

“Life Studies.” I sat up a bit and we faced each other almost level now.

“Again?” You motioned that you wanted to move around me and I moved forward as you laid back against the tub. You held your arms out for me to lay against you.

“Don’t again me.” I sat against you and leaned back against your chest, your arms wrapping around my waist. “You’ve read that copy so much it’s falling apart.”

“You’ll put the final nail in its coffin though.” You kissed the back of my neck.

“Whatever.” I picked the book up and opened to where I was when you got home. “Read to me, semi sweet man.”

“Fine.”

You read “Man and Wife” in a soft voice and I stared at the ceiling as I leaned my head against your chest. We were at home like this. If this was all that life involved, books and secret games and making love, we would have stayed in that tub for the rest of our lives, our hair graying as we struggled to lower our arthritic limbs into the bathtub for an afternoon of Amy Hempel’s short stories. Instead there was your job, my school, my parents, my supposed future, the difference in our ages, my insecurities that seemed to halt me at the doorway of actual happiness, the way I felt you loved me too much. Our chemistry was perfect but it couldn’t exist outside of this space. As soon as it hit oxygen, we would shatter. For a year, we would hide out until we had to face the world again.

We stretched out our legs, my short ones in between your long ones, and we read until the still of twilight fell over the house. You were still as you breathed into my ponytail and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world to have found you. The way you loved me made every nerve ending fire on all cylinders and made me feel as if I could take on anything. You cradled me for a year and when it came time to make decisions and see where we would go, I was the only one who did any going. I left you behind because we couldn’t continue living our lives away from reality. I hated the idea of wrenching myself from the comfort of your arms, your couch, your kitchen curtains but I needed to face the ugly things alone. You couldn’t hold my hand, you couldn’t protect me, you couldn’t go through things for me, you couldn’t fix me; I had to grow up on my own.

You loved me like a man but I could only love you like a girl. I wasn’t a woman yet, we weren’t equal. The fact that I needed you to become myself seems cruel but maybe that’s what you were for me. Maybe I was something else for you and now the world is different as a result. The world around you always changes when something ends or begins. Each lover that doesn’t work gives you a new set of eyes and another piece of baggage to carry around with you. Sometimes though, some of the baggage gets taken by someone who loves you enough for the both of you.

I dream of your bookshelves sometimes, your books deeply cared for, lovingly treasured belongings held on a pedestal. This is how you loved me, how you took care of me. We’re sitting in front of your books and you’re holding my hand. You tell me to pick any book I want and take it. I stand and look for a long time at all the choices and pick up a slim blue volume. I open it and the pages are blank. I turn and look at you only to see you mouthing something to me.

“Go.”

I hear a crack behind me and I back away, watching the beams of your bookshelves crumble and all the volumes on it fall in a pile of rubble. You sit watching it fall, standing only when the debris was still. You pick up a torn book from the pile and look at me over your shoulder.

“Time to begin again,” you say.

I wake up and look at the ceiling. My book is not entirely empty by this point in my life but you’ve left me plenty of room to keep filling it. I think of you now after this new heartbreak and begin anew.

Stained

With her legs up in the stirrups, Casey counted the panels in the ceiling. She looked down only far enough to see the frayed shoelaces of her yellow Chucks. In between her legs was the gynecologist, not the one Casey usually saw at the student health center but the only one available on short notice. She felt the speculum inside her vagina as the short-haired doctor looked inside her. Casey finally looked down from her counting game as the doctor removed the speculum and stood.

“I don’t know how to really say this. You’ve had a miscarriage, Casey,” the doctor said, putting aside the blood-covered instrument.

“That is, that’s impossible. I’m not pregnant.” Casey tried to sit up but the doctor stopped her as she moved.

“You were pregnant but unfortunately now you’re not. I’m sorry.” Her gloves were covered in blood and Casey tried not to stare at them.

“I had my period though, how could I be pregnant?” Casey inhaled deeply. She had no idea how this could be true. “I came in because I was having really awful cramps and I started bleeding through my underwear in class.”

“Well, you only seem to have been 12 or so weeks along, so it’s still early. Lots of women may still get a period when they’re pregnant so it can be hard to tell.” She peeled off her gloves and through them in the trash.

“Holy shit,” Casey breathed. “Jesus fucking christ.”

“I’m very sorry, Casey.” The doctor stepped closer and looked at Casey very seriously. “Now, there’s an important matter to discuss. You passed some of the remains of the fetus but from what I can tell, not all of it.”

“Remains?” Casey felt faint as she listened.

“Yes. This is what’s referred to as an incomplete abortion because there seems to be some tissue still in utero. You have two options here. I can prescribe you something and you’ll pass the rest of the tissue at home in the next 24 hours or we can do a D&C right now and remove the remaining tissue through vacuum aspiration. Do you want to think about it for a few minutes?” The doctor looked nervous even though she had done this with hundreds of patients over the years.

“Just get it out,” Casey choked out.

“Are you sure? I mean, do you have any questions?”

“I just want it out now. Please.”

“Okay, I’ll get the nurse and get everything set up. I’ll be right back.” The doctor pulled the curtain around Casey and left the room with the chart.

Casey had no idea how this was happening. Only an hour before she was sitting in Victorian Literature listening to discussion about Victorian women and their masturbation habits. When she felt her uterus cramp, she figured her period had struck and left the room to go to the bathroom. She pulled down her panties and saw her panties soaked in blood and what looked like clots. Something wasn’t right, she could feel it in her bones.Frightened, she quickly walked back into the classroom, slung her bag over her shoulder, and rode her bike to the health center on campus. The nurse told her she would have to make an appointment to see a doctor but upon seeing Casey’s anxious face, the nurse found a gynecologist on duty and escorted Casey to the exam room where she now had her legs spread in the air. It had only been an hour.

The doctor came back in and pulled back the curtain. A young nurse followed behind with a machine that had a hose attached. Casey’s eyes widened as she realized what was about to happen. The doctor and nurse snapped on latex gloves and the nurse handed the doctor a vial and a syringe. The nurse positioned the machine near the exam table and began adjusting dials on it.

“Casey, I’m going to use a local anesthetic to numb the area and then we’re going to begin the procedure. Do you have any questions?” asked the doctor.

“I’m fine. Just get it over with.”

The doctor sat on the stool and filled the syringe with the anesthetic. Casey felt a prick as the needle went in but soon felt numb in her nether regions. The doctor threw away the syringe, threw away her gloves, and gave the nurse directions on what levels to turn the knobs to. Casey heard the machine power on and buzz quietly. The doctor put on a mask and a new set of gloves. The nurse handed her the vacuum portion of the whirring machine and kept her eye on the levels of the machine. Casey had turned white and the doctor looked at her.

“Are you sure you’re ready?” The doctor looked concerned.

“Please just do it.”

Casey laid her head back and stared at the ceiling again. She felt tears run down her cheeks as the doctor eased the vacuum inside her. She couldn’t feel anything at all but she felt herself emptying regardless. The machine sounded incredibly loud all of a sudden and Casey hummed and sang to herself softly. Jai guru deva om jai guru deva om became her mantra as she tried not to cry too loudly. After twenty minutes, the noise stopped and Casey was startled at how quickly it was over. The doctor took Casey’s legs out of the stirrups and lowered her paper gown. The nurse gathered the machine’s cords as well as labeled a jar before leaving the room with both objects. Taking off her gloves, the doctor wrote something on Casey’s chart before walking back over to her.

“We’re going to keep you for a half hour, make sure everything’s okay, and then you can go home. Okay?”

“That’s fine, thank you,” Casey replied.

The doctor nodded and left the room. Casey curled up on her left side and pulled her legs in to her chest. She had stopped crying but she just held herself quietly, feeling nothing. She stayed in the same position for the next half hour and when the nurse came back in, she sat up slowly. The nurse scheduled an appointment for her in two weeks to make sure everything had gone alright. She also handed Casey a prescription for a mild painkiller in case she had any discomfort and pamphlets about dealing with the loss of a pregnancy. Casey pulled the curtain around and began to put her jeans and shirt back on, wobbly on her legs. The nurse noticed the wobble from the other side of the curtain.

“Do you need any help?” she asked, ready to pull back the curtain and take charge of the situation.

“I’m okay.” Casey pulled her shirt over her head and picked up her bag. She pulled back the curtain. “See? No problem.”

“Alright. Do you need to call someone to pick you up?”

“I’ll call my boyfriend when I get outside, I don’t have any reception in this building.” Casey had no intention of calling her boyfriend who was in class at the time but knew she would never make it out of the building without lying to these well-meaning women in scrubs.

“Okay. Just make sure he comes as soon as he can so you can rest.” The nurse picked up a plastic bag with what appeared to be some fabric inside. It was Casey’s blood soaked underwear. “I can throw these away if you want, it’s not a problem.”

“No, I’ll take them.” Casey grabbed the bag with her formerly light green underwear and shoved them inside her bag. She wasn’t sure why she wanted them but the last thing she wanted was for this woman to throw them away so nonchalantly.

“If you want to, they’re all yours,” the nurse said, opening the door for Casey. “Our number’s in the pamphlet, call us if anything feels off in the next few days. Otherwise, we’ll see you in two weeks.”

“Thank you.”

Casey walked through the open door and out through the lobby to the elevator. She knew she was being paranoid but she felt everyone’s eyes on her back as she waited for the elevator. The doors soon opened and she stepped inside. Her mind was blank as she rode to the ground floor and walked outside to where she had locked up her bike. She turned the key in the U-lock and opened it, hooking it onto her bag. Knowing better than to get on her bike even in her state of mind, Casey walked her bike by its handlebars all the way through campus to her apartment. For the first time maybe ever, she didn’t run into one person she knew and she thanked the universe for small favors.

She got to her apartment building on the edge of campus and lifted her bike on her shoulder as she climbed the flight of stairs. Unlocking the door, she wheeled her bike inside and leaned it against the wall. She put her bag on the kitchen table, unable to deal with its contents yet. She grabbed a Rolling Rock from her fridge and sat down at her desk. She grabbed an orange Post-It from the corner and a Sharpie and wrote her signature on it. Tearing it off, she drew a little mouse on the next one, tearing it off to stick next to the first one. She took a sip of her beer as she doodled mindlessly for a few minutes. Halfway through her beer, she grabbed her journal and opened it to the next blank page. She picked up her pen and began to write.

Today I lost something I never even knew I had.

Casey looked at what she had written on the page for a while and then closed the journal. Standing up, she grabbed her beer and walked the short distance into her bedroom. She lay back against her pillows and sipped her beer. She couldn’t believe anything about this day or that it wasn’t even over yet. It was only 5 PM and the fall sky was just getting that sort of pink glow that comes before sunset. She wanted the day to be over. Swallowing the last of her beer, she threw the empty bottle next to her on the bed and closed her eyes; she was asleep in minutes.

When she opened her eyes again, Casey felt warm breath on the back of her neck and an arm sliding around her waist. Her boyfriend Chris was home from class and spooning her like he always did when he found her napping. It was dark outside now and Casey blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dark room. Chris kissed the back of her neck and held her close.

“When did you get here?” Casey said, her cheek flattened against the pillow.

“Just now, I used my key. Altman was an asshole today,” he said to the back of her head. “My research paper on Vachel Lindsay is a mess apparently and he wants an entirely new draft by next week.”

“That sucks. I guess it’ll be a working weekend for you.” Casey didn’t turn to face him.

“Yeah, it will. Do you want me to heat up the chicken from last night for us?” He ran his hand over her abdomen lazily.

“Yeah, that’s good.” At the contact of his hand with her abdomen, she scooted away quickly and got off the bed. He followed after her, picking up the empty bottle of Rolling Rock off the sheets.

“Started early, baby?” He smirked at her and held up the bottle.

“Oh that, yeah. I just needed a drink after class.” She took the bottle from him and walked out of the room.

They went to the kitchen where she tossed the beer bottle into the trash. Chris took the chicken out of the fridge and took the lid off the container a bit before putting it in the microwave for two minutes. Casey leaned against the counter and stared into space as Chris went about putting plates on the small kitchen table and pouring each of them a glass of wine. She only snapped out of her daze when she noticed he was picking up her bag from the table.

“I’ll get that, give it to me,” she snapped, snatching it from his hands.

“I was just going to put it on the couch for you, baby. Don’t worry, I wasn’t mugging you.” He laughed at her reaction and Casey felt embarrassed that she had freaked out.

“Sorry. I’ve just been off today.” She put the bag on the couch and walked back to the table.

“Victorian Lit does that to anyone. I really don’t know how you’re reading Bleak House, that book makes me hate reading,” he said as he sat down and took a sip of his wine.

“It’s not as bad as the last time I read it. It’s not Clarissa at least.” She sat down and picked up her fork.

“Amen to that.”

They ate quietly, chatting occasionally about friends and things they had heard around the English department that day. Casey had two glasses of wine to Chris’s one and soon went to bed complaining of a headache. Chris sat in bed next to her on his laptop checking his email and several blogs he read. He smiled as he saw her curled up on her side next to him, one small foot sticking out from under the blanket. He put his laptop away and turned off the lamp. Reaching his arms around her, he fell asleep quickly.

Casey opened her eyes a few hours later and checked the time on her phone. 3:37 AM. She wiggled free of Chris’s arms and got out of bed. She put on a cardigan that was on her bedroom floor and made her way into the living room and specifically to her desk. She woke up with a pull in her gut to sit there and look through all the things she had brought home with her from the doctor. She picked up her bag and brought it over to the desk where she sat, legs slightly apart. The pamphlets came out first, pastel publications with photos of sad-looking women and lots of talk about grief and the depression that accompanies losing a pregnancy. Casey flipped these over and leafed through them, pretty sure she wasn’t one of these women; she hadn’t even known she was pregnant so it was a surreal feeling of loss when she missed something that had existed inside her without her knowledge. She felt conned and stupid. How could a woman not even be aware of cells forming life inside her? Casey stuck the pamphlets back inside her bag angrily.

She walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge for what was left of their bottle of wine from dinner. She uncorked it and poured herself a glass. Pacing the room, she sipped it slowly as she pushed her toes through the rug. This was the exact reason why she probably had the miscarriage, she thought. She drank almost everyday, always socially, but that had probably been what did this mystery baby in. The pot she smoked occasionally with her friends couldn’t have helped either. Casey finished her glass and poured herself another.

The pacing continued as she weaved past the hall closet. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the long mirror hanging beside it and stopped. Dark circles under her eyes and her hair looked stringy. She turned to the side to look at her body, running her hand over her abdomen. There was barely any kind of bump. She felt a little bloated in recent weeks but nothing out of this world. She couldn’t believe that a few hours before she had been 12 weeks pregnant. Her body didn’t even look different. There should have been something, some huge sign that she had a fucking baby inside her. It had come and gone as if it had never been there at all. Sniffing back tears, Casey walked back to her desk.

Wine spilled on the desk as she clumsily put the glass down but Casey was too busy searching through her bag to even notice. She dug her arm around until she found the plastic bag with her underwear in it. They were still light green cotton but most of the fabric was covered in dark, dried blood. Tears ran down her face as she looked at them. She wiped her cheek and whimpered as she realized that this was all that was left of her baby. Gulping down her wine, she held the bag in her hands and wondered about this baby, the remains as the doctor said. Not just whether it would have been a boy or a girl, but whether it would have had hair when it was born the way she had or if it would inherit Chris’s green eyes or her small hands. She wondered if it would have been an avid reader the way she and Chris were and whether it would have been clumsy and accident prone like she was. She cried for all of the the things they never got to find out.

Removing the underwear from the bag, Casey set it on the desk and gingerly touched them. She half expected a ghost to jump out, chastising her for not being more aware of her body and herself. Nothing happened. The underwear sat there stained and lonely. The more she looked at them, the angrier she became at herself for not knowing and being so fucking stupid. She was pro-choice and at the age of 21, she would have had an abortion, no matter how much she loved Chris. They would have been ill prepared to raise a child, being two selfish young adults who couldn’t even take care of themselves. She was angry that she had no choice. Things worked out the way they were supposed to but wasn’t she supposed to have that choice? So that if at the last minute she backed out and wanted the baby, she could have had it? She wiped her nose and thought of how nature knew better than to even give someone like her a child; it said no.

She opened to where she had last written in her journal and flattened the spine with her drunken hands. With her pen, she began to write deliberately, with thick, purposeful strokes. She looked down at what she had written and began to sob, moaning slightly with her hands in her head.

He had been hearing cries for a while but thought they were a part of his dreams and just turned over. When he realized that Casey wasn’t in bed anymore however, he bolted straight up and stumbled purposefully into the living room to find her sitting hunched up in her desk chair. He inched close to her and touched her shoulders.

“Case? What’s the matter?” he asked, terrified of what could be upsetting her like this.

“I-I can’t, I’ll be fine, I promise.” Her face was swollen from crying and she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s nothing.”

“This isn’t nothing, something happened. Tell me right now.” His shoulders became tense as his protective nature feared what could have happened to her.

“No, you’ll hate me.”

“I could never hate you, I just need to know what’s wrong. You’re scaring me.” He got to his knees to be at her level. “Please tell me what happened.”

Casey picked up the open journal and shoved it against his chest. He looked confused and she pointed to the page it was open to. He read it and saw two things.

Today I lost something I never knew I had.

Flannery.

“I don’t understand.” Chris looked back up at her and was confused. “What does this mean?”

“I lost our baby, Chris. This afternoon.” Defeated, she looked at him with tired eyes.

“You were pregnant? Why didn’t you tell me?” He was shocked and held the journal in front of him awkwardly.

“I didn’t know either, not until after it happened. They said I was 12 weeks along.” She wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t even know what to say.”

“You can say it, Chris, I know. I killed our baby, this is my fault.”

“How can you even say that? That makes no sense.” He reached for her as she tried to stand and stumbled.

“Don’t touch me, I’m disgusting. I didn’t even know I was fucking pregnant. Women are supposed to know that shit and I had no fucking clue.” She paced as she spoke. “My body and whatever higher power there is knew I’d be a shitty mother and this happened.”

“Baby, that’s insane. This could happen to anyone.” He watched her walk around.

“No, it can’t because other women know. They get that glow or feeling or whatever and I got nothing. I got bloody fucking underwear in the middle of class, that was my first hint that I was three months pregnant.” She picked them up off the desk and shoved them into his hands. “That’s how I knew something was wrong and not even specifically a miscarriage, just that I was bleeding in a way that seemed weird.”

He held the underwear in his hand and stared at them. Even in the dark living room, he could see they were stained with dry, crusty blood. He wanted nothing more than to put them down but couldn’t look away. It reminded him that this had happened and he hadn’t even been there. He gripped them in his left hand, pissed off.

“I should have been there.”

“How? I didn’t even know. I walked into the health center and suddenly they were removing it from me. The remains they called it.” She swallowed back more tears. “It was our little boy or girl.”

He walked over to her and took her in his arms, holding her against his chest. Her tears were warm against his chest and he hugged her tighter as they stood in the middle of the room. He hadn’t let go of her underwear yet but he didn’t even notice. She lifted her chin a little bit towards his face.

“I would have called it Flannery,” she whispered.

“Flannery?” He looked down at her. “Why Flannery?”

“I don’t know, it just came to me a little while ago. That’s what made me really cry hard. I realized it would be nice for a boy or a girl and we both love Flannery O’Connor. It made sense.”

“It does.”

“It made me upset though. It felt more real then. It wasn’t just the remains anymore.” She held onto him. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“What do you mean, baby?” He ran his fingertips along her arm.

“Do we do anything? There’s no body, do we have a funeral? Was it even our baby yet?”

“I don’t know. I’ve obviously never been through this.”

“Me either. I wish I knew what to do. I want to feel better now.” She let go of him and stared at him. “I just want closure.”

He looked at her exhausted but beautiful face and wanted to fix everything that was wrong at that moment and every other moment they would face. He reached for her and realized he was still holding the bloody underwear. He considered them.

“There’s not a body but this is what’s left. What if we buried it?” He held the underwear up.

“We could try that,” she replied, willing to try anything to ease the guilt she had felt since that afternoon.

“Put your shoes and jacket on.” He walked over to the door and stepped into his flipflops.

“Now?” She looked incredulous.

“I don’t think we’ll sleep any other way.” He waited for her to grab her jacket and put on her shoes.

They walked downstairs and into the clammy night. It was cool and slightly drafty. Casey pulled her jacket up around her throat as they walked. Chris led the way, around the block to an abandoned lot that had sat there for as long as Casey had lived in that apartment. They stumbled over roots on the ground and finally came to a stop at a spot near a streetlamp.

“What now?” Casey asked, nervously looking around her.

“We have to bury it I guess.”

“With what?”

“Hm. Well, here, hold this,” he said, handing her the underwear. She held them to her as if they were fragile.

Down on his hands and knees, he used his hands to pull up grass and dirt. He dug with his hands for a good twenty minutes, leaving a decently sized hole. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Ready?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

She knelt down and placed the underwear in the hole. She began to cover it with dirt and soon he knelt as well to help her. He swore he heard her whisper that she was sorry over and over again as she buried what was left of their baby. When they finished, they wiped their hands on their clothes and walked away. He looked over his shoulder as they left.

They walked back to the apartment, clasping hands as they made their way up the stairs slowly. Casey unlocked the door and they kicked off their shoes as they entered. They stood at the kitchen sink together and washed their hands of the dirt from the burial. The sun was beginning to rise outside as they stripped down to their underwear. They climbed into bed and she nestled against him, her back to him. He wrapped his arms around her as always and rested his hands on her tummy; she didn’t flinch this time.

“Chris.” She turned her head over her shoulder to look at him.

“Yeah?”

“Do you feel any better now?”

“No.”

“Me either.”

She turned her head away from him again and he held her tighter. Neither one slept a lot that night or any nights for a long time.

When I was 10 or so, I killed a duck.

It was a fucking accident alright?

My friend Amanda and I were playing in her backyard and behind her house was a canal. In Florida, we have a lot of canals. In said canals, there are water meters that look like ducks, very realistic coloring and whatnot. So. Amanda and I are in her backyard, swimming maybe, or perhaps.. I don’t even know, to be honest. All I know is we were in the backyard when we spot this duck meter in the canal. Amanda was a tough cookie even as a kid and she calls me out.

“You throw like a girl, Anaïs,” she said, her freckles dark in the sunlight.

“I am a girl. Why isn’t that okay?” I sighed thinking about my terrible aim.

“I bet you couldn’t hit that duck out there.” She set her mouth into a prim line and there we were.

“It’s so far away, that’s not fair.” I knew I couldn’t hit that target even if I tried.

“You just know you can’t hit it.” What a bitch. She still is one from what I hear.

“Fine. Give me a ball or something.” I put my hands on my nonexistent hips.

She looked around and found no balls so she picked up a big rock from the side of the wooden fence and handed it to me.

“There you go, use this,” she said.

The rock was pretty big and I had to hold it with both hands. I didn’t want to do this, I knew I would miss and be laughed at forever but Amanda’s smug face made me swallow hard and walk towards the edge of the canal. Amanda followed close behind and stood behind me as I lifted the rock in my right hand, feeling the tiny muscles in my arm work overtime. I exhaled and threw it in the direction of the duck as hard as I could.

We watched it fly in the air and I realized halfway through its flight that it was going to hit. I was so excited, I had never hit anything I aimed for in my entire life. This was going to be glorious. Amanda looked shocked as she watched the rock head for the duck. I smiled as it hit its target only to hear the most awful noise my ears have ever been witness to.

KWAHSUIEWHRIO!*&YT#^R76TYOIUJ9OPMOIiujkshdfbeudibc98Y!U(HiuJKHP(&*Gv87ybi!!?!NU!Y!(*

That was the noise the duck made when the rock hit. Yes, the duck. Not the duck meter but the duck. Amanda and I stood in horror as it flapped around crazily for a full minute before it sunk underwater, water bubbles left in its wake. We looked at each other, hoping that the duck was just swimming maybe or getting a drink of water but no. We stood for a half hour and no duck. Amanda and I walked from the edge of the canal into her house in silence. We sat on the living room to play video games and didn’t say a word to each other the rest of the day. My mom picked me up after dinner and it was never mentioned again.

I had nightmares about a zombie duck coming to attack me for weeks. It would just quack at me but i knew exactly what it was saying: “You are a duck murdering bitch, Anaïs”. I didn’t tell anyone about these dreams or about the “duck murder” for years. When I finally did, the reactions ranged from hysterical laughter to horror. My mom is convinced that this is why ducks don’t seem to like me, they always give me the evil eye when I see them out in nature. I’m waiting for a bunch of them to corner me in a dark alley and let me have it. Fucking ducks.

But really, I feel terrible. It was a terrible accident and as a result, I can’t watch Ducktales or Mighty Ducks without feeling like an asshole. That Gordon Bombay is giving me judgmental looks that he should be reserving for Pacey. I don’t know. This isn’t really my fault but Amanda’s. Yeah, that’s what I’m going to tell people. That works, right?

certainly

There are things that you know beyond the shadow of a doubt and other things you will wonder about as your mind floats away from tasks at hand. I know that my bones fit with your bones, our muscles and skin folding around each other to build a perfect cage for our weary hearts to rest together while we talk about the day. On the other hand, I wonder about how many children we will have one day. I know for certain that I will be covered in invisible tattoos, full sleeves, backpiece, ribpiece, of every place your lips will touch. I wonder what we will eat for dinner. I know that our bodies were formed as perfect puzzle pieces, fitting into each other at the hungriest points, torn apart before we were born and thrown into a world where we had to find each other again and again. I wonder what you will get me for my birthday. We surpass and expand time itself, finding each other in every imaginable era, you lighting my cigarette outside a speakeasy in the 1920s, me writing you letters as you fight in one of the thousands of wars this world has seen.

I know that despite all of the mistakes and the fears and the insecurities, I have no doubt in my mind that things have happened as they should and we are exactly where we should be right now. I used to worry and second guess everything, especially myself, but now I am certain, if only of the fact that this is one of the few things I will ever be certain about in my life. I still do not have answers for the where and how and when and why but I have my who, and that is enough of an answer for now.

She’s Got Blood In Her Eyes For You

I got my first period on Justin Timberlake’s birthday. I don’t mean the day he was actually born but rather January 31st, 2000, when I was 13. I know this because I can remember Carson Daly announcing this on TRL on the tv in my bedroom as I lay on my adjoining bathroom’s floor and wept for the day I had been dreading since I had been born. I didn’t want a period. I had read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and was not excited. I saw that my mom became approximately 37.5 billion times more insane for one week out of the month and wanted nothing to do with these shenanigans. I was entirely okay not being a woman entirely because really, who gets psyched when someone tells you that you’re going to bleed out of your cooter, retain water, get crampy, want junk food, and act like those Cathy comics that didn’t really make sense to you as a kid? No one, that’s who.

I had the worst stomach pains all afternoon in school and my hypochondriac mind, highly trained by my mother, immediately had thoughts of appendicitis running through it as I felt dull, gnawing pain in my lower tummy. My mom picked me up from school and I felt slightly better. It was the one day per week that I didn’t go to hours of ballet class so I came home, kicked off my school loafers, and untucked my blouse from my plaid uniform skirt. I turned on my tv and went to the bathroom. I pulled down my underwear and sat on the toilet to pee. I looked down at my underwear between my legs and felt sick to my stomach. My underwear was stained crimson and I was basically sure that this was the day I would meet my maker. I let out a pained gasp and threw myself on the bathroom floor, skirt around my waist, underwear down to my knobby knees.

“MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” I screamed, my lungs letting out gusts of air as I prayed she would make it in time to say goodbye at least.

I heard Carson Daly chatting it up while I heard my mom’s footsteps bound up the stairs and run into my room and then into my bathroom. She stood in Mom Mode at the door and stared down at me.

“Oh my god, Anaïs, what’s wrong?” A vein in her forehead throbbed as she looked for what was wrong.

“I’m bleeding, I think I’m dying,” I choked out in the most pitiful voice ever heard.

“Bleeding?” She leaned forward and looked at my underwear. “Anaïs. It’s just your period. You knew this was going to come eventually.”

“But these stomach pains are REALLY bad, this can’t just be my period.” I couldn’t believe she was wasting the precious time she had left with me ignoring my symptoms.

“Sweetheart, I assure you that’s what it is.” She sighed in relief. “Don’t scare me like that again. I’ll get you some tampons from my bathroom.”

She walked out and I laid there on the floor thinking. Welcome to womanhood. What the cock was this? How could this be right? I had no idea how it made sense to bleed once a month. Didn’t my body need that blood? Maybe every six months would be okay but every month? Shit. This could not be right. I listened to some squealing girls singing Happy Birthday to Justin Timberlake and wondered how he got the short end of the stick. He got to celebrate being a man with cake and I got to celebrate being a woman with bleeding and pain? Fuck you, Justin Timberlake. Fuck. You.

My mom came back in with a box of tampons and explained how to use them. I sat up and looked at the directions. It looked terrifying. It was definitely going to get lost inside me and one day I would get pregnant and my baby would eat it and die. These were the things going through my mind as I contemplated putting a tampon inside me. This was not going to end well.

“I want my own tampons, not yours.” I made a bratty face.

“They’re just regular tampons, Anaïs, it’s not as if I’ve used them.” She looked ready to strangle me.

“I don’t care, I want my own box.” I was not budging on this. If I was a woman now, I would have my own things. That my mother bought for me.

“Fine. Put one in now and we’ll go to the store and get you some.” She stood up and walked out of the bathroom.

I looked at the directions again and inserted the tampon without dying or feeling it go off into the vast area that was the inside of my body. I took off my bloody underwear and threw them in the garbage. I walked into my room and grabbed a new set of underwear from my drawer and slipped them on. Justin Timberlake was having cake pushed into his face by the other members of NSYNC on TRL and I scowled. Fucking Justin Timberlake. He didn’t have to go through the embarrassment of having to buy tampons. I turned off the tv and walked downstairs.

My mom and I rode to Publix in silence. We parked and walked inside, my mom grabbing a basket. We walked to the feminine ladybusiness aisle and there among all the pregnancy tests and lube and UTI medication were the tampons and pads. I stared for a long time.

“What do I get?” I asked, overwhelmed by all the options.

“Just get the same ones I have, they’re good,” my mom said.

“I don’t want the same ones as you though.”

“Well, they seem to be doing their job right now, aren’t they?” Her knuckles were white as she gripped the basket handle.

“Still, I want another kind.” I picked up a bright pink box and held it up. “Is this okay?”

“That’s a super sized one, I highly doubt your 13-year-old vagina needs that, Anaïs.”

“Fine.” I put it back and picked up a light blue box. “These?”

“That should be fine.” She turned to walk away.

“Wait, I want pads, too.”

“Why?”

“So I can wear them when I go to sleep or if I just don’t want to wear a tampon. Duh.” I rolled my eyes at her.

She picked up a pink box of pads and threw them in the basket and began to walk away. I followed after her and I noticed the bottles we were passing.

“Mom. Mom. Wait.”

“What? There is nothing else here to soak up the blood from your vagina, I promise you.”

“I need Midol.” I tried to give her my best sympathetic face.

“Advil does the exact same thing, Anaïs.” She stared me down.

“But everyone in school takes Midol when they get their periods. Please?”

“Fine. Pick out the Midol while I get some things for dinner.” She turned and walked down the aisle.

I stood in front of all the different types of Midol and stared. I started reading each package. A blue one, a purple one, a pink one, a green one. They all had the same exact ingredients just different names. “INTENSE CRAMP RELIEF”, “BLOAT CONTROL”, “PMS FIGHTING”. I didn’t even know where to begin. I finally chose the blue box with the “FIGHTS ALL THE SYMPTOMS OF PERIODS” because I wanted to be thorough. It would suck if I missed one of the symptoms.

I found my mom by the register paying and gave her the Midol as she paid with her credit card and signed the receipt. We drove home in silence and pulled into the garage. I got out with my bag of necessary period survival supplies and went to my bathroom. I removed the tampon I had in and put in a new one and placed a pad on the crotch of my underwear to be certain no blood escaped. I filled a Dixie cup with water in my bathroom and took two Midol tablets as the instructions read. I laid down on my bed and waited to feel the relief. Nothing happened. I eventually fell asleep and woke up to the sun having set.

I rubbed my eyes and wandered downstairs to the kitchen. My dad wasn’t home yet and I saw my mom at the table putting Funfetti frosting on a cake. My heart filled with joy.

“Is that Funfetti?” I tried not to jump up and down.

“Someone’s feeling better.” My mom smirked. “The Midol must have worked.”

“I guess so.” I sat down at the table next to her. “What’s the cake for?”

“You.” She poured the sprinkles over the cake. “You’re a brat but you have your period, so you deserve to have some cake. It’s our right as women to eat whatever we want when we have our periods.”

“I can get behind this idea.” I wondered how soon I could dig in.

“Plus, I need some cake, too.” She wiped her hands on a napkin. “It’s just another sign that you’re not going to be a kid much longer.”

“I’ll always be a kid.” I stuck my finger in the frosting and licked it. “But for the sake of cake, I’ll be okay with this period stuff.”

“I bet you will,” she laughed. “God, just wait till you get boobs.”

I ignored this and got up to get plates and forks and a knife. My mom cut each of us a huge slice of cake and we ate blissfully. I still had cramps but all I could focus on was the happy part of having a period: cake. A big fuck you to you, Justin Timberlake. I’ll have my cake and eat it, too. I was growing up, if only physically. I didn’t feel like a woman yet but that day would come and it would bring breasts.

Christ, would it bring breasts.

I feel your burning eyes

I accept and I collect upon my body the memories of your devotion.
-Antony & the Johnsons

I’ve been talking and thinking a lot about scars lately. I don’t really know why, things seem fine on the surface. Maybe it was my childhood, I was an only child and an only grandchild on my mom’s side, and I was treated like a tiny fragile bird. That’s what girls are after all. Any time I’d attempt to climb a tree and do something unsafe like attempting to skateboard, my family would automatically put a stop to it. Don’t get me wrong. I was a kid who also enjoyed dolls and wearing dresses and being girly but there was this overwhelming attempt to shelter me from everything. I never got those childhood badges of courage that other kids get except accidentally now and then. I have scars from mosquito bites and a tiny scar on my hand from when a firework landed on my hand on the 4th of July when I was almost two.

I think I have a desire for the visual, I like seeing the results of something in front of me. When I write something, no matter the audience or format, I always print it out to have it physically tangible. I feel guilty for killing trees with all my printing but I can’t help it. I need the evidence of an experience gone through or created right in front of me. I need to feel it, I need to look in the mirror and see it.

As an adult, I’ve earned my own badges of courage like that gash in the pool and the seemingly innocuous fall in front of the bagel shop a few years ago; it was nothing but I still have a perfectly round scar on my left kneecap. I’ve never worn leg makeup nor wanted to, if my legs are visible, you may notice everything on them, faded to a soft pinkish white. Maybe you’ll see slight stretchmarks on my hips from when I grew into them during puberty.

You’ll definitely see the self-inflicted badges of courage. I got a few tattoos with a broken, heavy heart in my throat. Only the first one was completely joyous at the time; he tattooed a star in between my shoulderblades with india ink in our bedroom. I felt his hands on my back and the tiny prick of the needle as blood dripped, following the curve of my spine. At that moment, nothing seemed more perfect and true. It was beautiful, a hollow star, burned out on my skin.

It was only when he left and we broke that it became a burden. I noticed the star’s legs were slightly wonky. Everyone asked about it, touching my back without asking permission when I wore a backless shirt. My next lover was not understanding. She was insecure and jealous of this physical bond with my past, and felt threatened by a ghost seemingly bigger than her and I. It should have been my first sign of something awry with her. I was sick of carrying this around on my back, having it speak before I even opened my mouth. I tore a much-loved image off my bedroom wall and took it to a local tattoo artist. He said he couldn’t cover it. The next artist I visited said the same thing. I finally found someone who would cover it and made an appointment. As a side note, I’ll say that this was a glorious day because I lost something but gained something new: I met my best friend, Heidi.

Regardless, when I arrived for my appointment, I was ready. I wore a blue bra and my red hoodie on backwards, zipped up my back so he could work on the space in between my shoulderblades. I straddled a very comfortable chair and lowered my head. He placed the transfer of the image of a hamsa, a talisman of protection in both Muslim and Jewish cultures, on my back. It peeled off cool and wet and I prepared myself. The first line of a tattoo hurts the most and then your adrenaline kicks in. Some people spend the whole time getting a tattoo in pain but I’m the opposite, it’s pleasurable. I have a high pain threshold but I must have messed up wiring because I get off on that kind of pain. He drilled and soon I just rested my head and let the soothing vibrations lull me into a state of bliss.

My girlfriend soon arrived to sit with me during the tattoo and she looked smug. I could see all over her face that she thought she had won. I wanted to slap that look off her face. I wanted her to understand that this had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. The look in her eyes made me realize that no matter how hard we tried, it would never work; she was too small, too weak of a person to ever be with and be truly myself with. If she was threatened by the past and only interested in covering things up and rewriting history, how would she face the future? I rested my face in my arms and let the man with tattooed knuckles drill a new image into my back for over three hours. My girlfriend and I went home. I slept in pain on my stomach that night. After two weeks, the tattoo had scabbed over and healed. Two days after the last scab fell off in the shower and two days before Valentine’s Day, I asked my girlfriend to move out. I gave her back her ring as she almost slammed my bedroom door off its hinges.

The hamsa covered the star well and I liked to believe that it protected me from the evil eyes of my girlfriend and everyone else who would have liked to see me dead at that time in my life. I don’t know if it protected me in the ways I expected but it helped me start what would be a new life. Like I said, I met one of my dearest friends, one of my soulmates, and I remembered what it was like to live a life for myself. I carried something new between my shoulderblades but my back was straighter; it was heavier than before but my shoulders were straight back and I lifted my past easily. Eventually the star began to show through a bit and I felt it was appropriate. You can’t escape anything in life, especially not old love. You’ll always carry that with you no matter how you try to forget, it will always be there; it’s how you carry it and how you deal with the past that matters. It’s as if love is something ever evolving. Once created, it may change form but the tangible emotion will always live between two people as something linking them by their guts, a pull or a push that keeps them orbiting each other whether they know it or not.

A while after I covered it, he and I saw each other again, and one thing led to another. As we were lying on the floor afterwards, my neck marked by his mouth, his back scratched by my nails, I turned onto my side and he noticed that I had covered it. I tensed a little bit, wondering if he would be angry that I tried to erase him. Instead, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to it.

“It’s still there,” he said, with his mouth to my back. “I can see it.” His eyes burned into my back and I let it go. It was his now. I slept easily on that floor.

The Bump

Whenever people I know talk about getting plastic surgery, I instantly jump and say, “No, you’re beautiful! Stay natural, be yourself, you’re perfect.” I understand that this isn’t always the case since some people are unattractive but still, we should try to accept our faces and bodies for the most part. If you really want to get work done, I can get that but you know, beauty’s fades so like yourself as you are. The thing is, I always say or start to say things like this but then I remember that I’ve had plastic surgery.

Yes, I had my nose done when I was almost 18. I’m 22 but my nose is only 4 and a half.

Let me back up a bit. After I went to my junior prom the previous spring, my friends and I all gathered at someone’s house to hang out and whatnot. I’m pretty sure there was no drinking going on that night but again, I can’t be certain. All I am certain of is that I ended up diving into what was the shallow end of the pool and hitting the cement bottom face (and nose) first. Let me tell you, I swept the pool with my face, it was ugly. I surfaced and my friend screamed her head off; I had cuts all over my face and “road rash” I guess you could say on my chin and left cheek. My nose was swollen and bleeding, the tip scraped and bloody. There were no parents in sight so my friends helped me ice and bandage my face. I spent the night and awoke the next day still swollen and looking like Tina Turner after a night with Ike. We took pictures, now lost, and I looked like I should have been in a Lifetime movie. Poolside Menace: The Anaïs Escobar Story.

I got home from the prom sleepover/catastrophe and said hi to my mom as I opened the front door. She screamed when she saw my face and called my grandma and they took me to see my uncle who’s a doctor. He wrote me a prescription for ointment for my cuts and scrapes and he looked at my nose and said there didn’t seem to be any serious damage; the bump that stuck out on the left side was something that had been there for years. Everyone yelled at me and told me how lucky I was that I didn’t snap my neck and I listened and took something to sleep. I went to school the next day and told everyone I had been in a fight with my ex-best friend which became a funny rumor amongst us AP kids. A few weeks later, the swelling had gone down and the scabs starting falling off in the middle of AP US History. It seemed my days of being a scarfaced badass were over.

Summer came and I was my lazy self. I woke up early to swim laps and run, but then I would nap for hours at a time while reading biographies of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and an entire history about Appalachia. If you didn’t think I was a nerd before, now it’s official. My mom had taken to listening to me while I napped because she could hear me wheezing and whistling in my sleep. She got worried and so off we went to the otolaryngologist (that’s an ear, nose, and throat specialist for those who don’t think obsessively about words like me). He took a look at my nose and made a face.

“I’m going to do a little test with these tubes, okay?” he said to me, readying the tubes in his hands.

“Sure, go for it,” I said, not really nervous.

“I’m going to insert these slowly up your nostrils to see how open your sinuses are.”

He pushed the first one up my right nostril slowly and it went all the way up and I could feel it in my face which was creepy yet awesome. He removed it and began to push the tube up my left nostril. He got like an inch up when I screamed. It felt like he was stabbing my sinuses with a tiny knife. My mom turned white as I reacted so violently. I pulled away and he looked like he had his answer. He did a few more things, feeling up my face with his thumbs, taking photos with some crazy camera. Then he sat down to give us his medical opinion.

“Your septum is deviated. You’re not getting any air through one passageway which explains why you are wheezing while sleeping. Most likely, your septum has always been deviated but the pool incident worsened the condition. That’s why you have the bump in the side of your nose, it’s from the septum. You’ll have to have surgery to correct the breathing,” he said. I looked at his Prada loafers and then back at his face.

“So, I’ve always had this deviated septum which gave me the bump I’ve always had but now it’s worse because of the face-into-pool thing?” I asked, imagining myself with a Michael Jackson nose.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Can you leave the bump and just fix the septum?” My mother looked at me like I had asked the stupidest question of all time.

“Well, no.” He began drawing a diagram of my nose on a little notepad. “When I go in and adjust the septum, there will be excess matter that will need to come off in order for it to sit in place. It won’t be a traditional nose job per se because we won’t be breaking your nose. It’ll be your nose, just better, sort of how it would look if you could breathe perfectly.”

I thought about how my dad had the same bump on his nose and he breathed just fine. I knew that my situation was different, that I had added something extra to the breathing equation but still. My nose was this thing that I inherited from him and now it was going to have to change because of this stupid mishap. I was bummed but what could I do?

“Of course, you could always tweak things here and there if you wanted to, while I was in there, I mean,” he continued.

“Like what?” I asked. I was curious despite my feelings of daughterly guilt over the whole thing.

“Let me take some photos and show you.”

I stood in front of the far wall and he took some photos of my profile from both sides and also facing forward. He uploaded them into the laptop in the patient room and began tapping away at the keys. A few minutes later, he pulled the laptop up on a table in front of my mom and me and we sat to look at the photos. There was my nose and my face in profile, same as ever. Then he showed us the after effects of what he had worked on. It looked exactly the same but better. To this day, I can’t explain it. It was my nose, still slightly big and whatnot, but prettier somehow. I am ashamed to say I was drawn in
by how simple it seemed: rotating the tip of my nose 25 degrees upwards, narrowing my nostrils just slightly, and of course the bump that stood between me and oxygen being shaved off. After a twenty minute demonstration, I was sold.

My surgery was scheduled for November 23, two days before Thanksgiving. My dad agreed that it was for the best since I couldn’t breathe that well but I sensed that he felt a little bummed about my good old nose that looked like his and his family’s noses. An ex-boyfriend had called it Anne Frank-esque at one point; yes, thanks for bringing my part Jewish heritage into this, pal. My parents signed off on it and were both pleased that my health insurance would cover up to 90% of the entire cost since it was for medical reasons and not just cosmetic. My dad paid the difference and I think that may have counted as part of my high school graduation gift.

At my high school, plastic surgery was a common gift to many girls. Every first day of school, someone came to homeroom with huge new boobs or plumped lips or a new nose. I really believed that I was different that I wasn’t just one of those girls, that my reasons were different but were they? I most likely wouldn’t have gone to the extent of having anything changed about my nose aesthetically if it weren’t for the septum-pool catastrophe but I was lured by the somehow prettier me in the after photo. I told my friends about the upcoming surgery and most laughed, not believing that I was going to actually go through with this. Others were nosy as teenagers tend to be.

“What kind of nose did you pick?” Jackie asked me as we sat in pre-calc doing groupwork by which I mean we were talking shit about other people.

“What do you mean, what kind of nose did i pick?” I replied, honestly confused by the question.

“I mean, did you look through a book and pick which one you liked?” she continued.

“No, they take pictures of you and just improve upon what’s there.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense. I hope it turns out okay.”

Me too, I thought to myself. Me fucking too.

During the few weeks before surgery, I watched every nose job episode of Dr. 90210 and Extreme Makeover and whatever else plastic surgery show was on. My mom winced at the doctors cracking noses and resetting them but I needed it. I wanted to know exactly what was going to happen to me when I was under. I had never had surgery before and I wasn’t so much scared as I was intensely curious about what was going to happen when I wasn’t aware. I googled all of the side effects and learned about all the things that could go wrong. I googled “death by nose job” more than once; there were some prime horror stories I bookmarked. The more I learned, the calmer I became about the whole thing. The day before my surgery, I went to school like everything was normal and went to sleep that night very relaxed.

I awoke the day of surgery at 4 in the morning to get to the hospital early since my surgery was at 8am. My mom was wringing her hands and freaking out. She and my grandparents came to the hospital with me and they all looked very stressed about the whole thing. They made me put on my hospital gown and they put the IV in my arm. My mom teared up as we sat in the pediatric surgery in between room (I was a minor, whoa!) and she kissed my forehead and cheeks a bunch of times before they made her go. They gave me amazing drugs and I talked to the adorable gay male nurse about how I was going to drink mimosas on Thanksgiving while I took all the Percocet the doctor prescribed me. He said that was his perfect Sunday. I became relaxed thanks to whatever was dripping into my veins and soon they wheeled me into surgery. I saw my doctor and we chatted for a bit and then the anesthesiologist put the mask on me and asked me to count back from ten. I made it to ni-. Then it was all black, as surgery goes like that.

I woke up in recovery having no clue what the fuck was going on. All I knew was that I felt a weight on my face and that my bladder was about to burst. I tried to talk but my throat was so dry. I heard myself and I sounded like I belonged in a stage production of The Miracle Worker (“Water, Helen, WATER!” “WAJSHIUFDHIOSNDKJ”). I began to sit up but as soon as I did, nausea struck and I threw up all over myself. Dark, bloody vomit everywhere. A nurse came over and quickly got me out of my hospital gown and cleaned up. I tried to touch my face while I was laying there naked waiting for my new hospital gown but I was admonished right away. They put me in a new gown and I realized I had to pee. The nurse gave me a bedpan but I refused to pee in it. I sat up without puking this time and insisted on going to the bathroom in an actual toilet. This nurse wanted to kill me by now but she guided me by the arm and stood guard while I peed for a good 10 minutes. That was seriously the best piss of my life.

Once they got me back into my recovery bed, they let my mom come into see me. She was crying and blubbering and talking really loudly at me. Apparently, my one hour surgery extended into a three hour one and my family thought I was dead or that something awful had happened. My mom was abusive to hospital staff in order to get information and she was relieved to find out that my surgeon was just a slowpoke perfectionist. Everything turned out great according to him and I could go home in a few hours. I stayed for those few hours and cleaned the hospital out of apple juice. Sorry about that. I had had my surgery and survived, plus I still had a nose; things were good.

I went home that afternoon and had the best recovery of all time. My grandma made me soup and anything else I wanted to eat: peanut butter & honey sandwiches, sweet potato fries, almond milk strawberry milkshakes. I was living it up. I watched tons of movies from childhood including Ghostbusters and Back to the Future, and I got to enjoy the annual Thanksgiving screening of Gone With The Wind. I love watching Atlanta burn. The drugs were great and I didn’t even abuse them; I had very little pain to be honest. I received phone calls from my friends like an old Hollywood star, in my pajamas and in bed, telling my family to take messages for me when I couldn’t be bothered. I milked this for all it was worth. After all, I’m a healthy person, when would be the next time I’d have people at my beck and call?

I thought I would be grossed out by the healing process but it was interesting more than anything else. I took the packing out of my nostrils the day after surgery by pulling the attached little strings and saw what looked like two bloody tampons fall easily out of my nasal passages. My mom saw this and ran out of the room gagging. After surgery, I didn’t bruise at all. This is probably due to the fact that they didn’t have to break my nose in this nose job but my friends were disappointed nonetheless. They wanted me to have black eyes and to look really dramatic post surgery. I felt bad seeing how bummed they looked that I looked exactly the same the next week at school. The only change was that dissolvable stitches fell out of my nose now and then.

Truly, I was shocked by this. I had expected that when my doctor took off my splint a week after surgery, I would have this dramatic Extreme Makeover moment where I gasped and saw that I had become the most gorgeous creature ever. Instead I looked in the mirror he handed me and saw the same nose, a little bit perkier but nothing that was noticeable really. I could breathe better now which was the point but the whole thing had become something else entirely what with the promise of a magical feeling once my nose was improved upon. I just felt like me. As the swelling went down more and more, I realized the most dramatic change was that the bump was gone. It sounds silly but I had never really noticed it to begin with. It had always just been there. I remember when I was 12, I played Brigitta (the bratty Von Trapp child) in a local production of The Sound of Music and one of my fellow child costars commented on my having a prominent nose; I can honestly say that until that moment, I had never even thought of my nose as anything other than just being there. I became aware of the bump then but I never worried about it more than the occasional passing thought. It was never an albatross carried on my face, it just was.

People couldn’t really tell the difference due to the subtle work. They said I looked better somewhat but couldn’t figure out why; my lips looked bigger apparently, though. After healing, it was like surgery had never happened. Even now, I sometimes forget that I’ve had a nose job. The change wasn’t big enough to really notice because I guess for me that wasn’t the reason for doing it. I’m not saying that I wasn’t drawn in and attracted to the cosmetic reasons for doing it but it was such a subtle change that it’s like it never happened. I breathe much better now, I no longer making a dying whistling noise when I sleep apparently. Everyone in my vicinity is pleased about this. The whole thing just slips my mind a lot of the time.

I have to admit though, I think about it nowdays in a specific manner a bit more since I see my dad more than I used to. I look at his face and we still look so much alike but I also see where there’s something missing from my face that’s on his. I worry that I’ll have a daughter one day who inherits my deviated septum and bump and has a nose that looks conspicuously different from her mom’s. What do I say then? I did indeed have my nose fixed for medical reasons but can I lie about the tip rotation, the nostril refining? I don’t know if I could lie.

“It’s true, I couldn’t breathe but I’m also a vain bitch.”

“I don’t regret it at all, I like my nose now but yours is perfect just as it is.”

Even now, I sometimes have guilt about this change as tiny as it was. I feel like I betrayed the things I believe about beauty, how I feel that imperfections make people gorgeous: crooked teeth, scars, prominent features. To this day I still think that people with imperfect faces are the most interesting and beautiful. I feel jealous as well. I find myself staring at my dad’s nose and imagining how my old one would have aged over time. If I have a kid with my former bump, I’ll be jealous of this bond that he or she has with our family history that no longer shows right on my face. I have a million other things that show my life history on my face and body but I suppose I’m slightly bitter that circumstances took this one away. Although, the bump’s lack of existence has become a part of my history as a result.

Things like this never really turn out how you expect. I miss my bump sometimes with the same intensity that I get when I don’t like some of my tattoos at times. Similarly, I then feel attached to the scars on birthmarks on my body and want to hang onto certain tattoos for what they represented to me when they were permanently engraved onto my bleeding skin. It’s why I take time to get to know the nuances of a new lover’s body. I always want to hear the story behind a scar and count freckles and moles, and discover the treasures hidden by clothing and the constraints of privacy and awkwardness.

Maybe that’s the big thing behind it all, I suppose. Whatever happens to your body, by your own choice or not, it’s there, it’s part of your body now. You may choose to cover a tattoo that a lover gave you or change the breasts nature gave you or cut yourself or cover scars with makeup but the stories behind all of those are still there on your body. Everything has a story, a small piece of something daunting and scary that makes up a life. It doesn’t really matter what you look like, if your nose bump is gone, if your ass is huge, if you have acne scars, if you have a fucking stupid tattoo that you wish you never got, if you have jacked teeth, it’s all a part of your story, your mythos; maybe the physical tells the stories we just can’t put into words yet. I guess we’re all just looking to build our personal legend any way we can.

Morning Sickness Becomes Electra

I was an accident.

I don’t mean that in a really dramatic, “I wasn’t wanted!” Lifetime movie way but in all seriousness, I was an accident. My mom confirmed this after my parents got divorced when I asked her once while she was drunk.

“So you just told me you had wanted to divorce Daddy since early in your marriage. Why did you have me then?” I said to her as her glazed-over eyes swirled.

“Well, you weren’t planned. I wanted you, I wanted a baby but I was all set to leave,” she slurred. “It just never worked with your father, we weren’t a good match.”

She then tried to tell me about her apparently nonexistent sex life with my father but I stopped her before my therapy bill became astronomically high.

What happened was that my parents were married for about four years during which things just weren’t really working out. As they were about to hit their fourth wedding anniversary in early 1986, they decided to go on a final trip to see if they could work out their problems. They went to North Carolina and stayed in a bed and breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains; unlike me and my dad, my mother is not one to rough it. After a long weekend which apparently involved some kind of sex or at the very least, some sperm got inside my mom somehow, they left for Florida, having come to the resolution that they weren’t meant for each other and that they were going to get a divorce.

My mom started packing up some things and she told my grandparents about the end of her marriage which pissed them off to no end. They were traditional and at that time, much less open minded than they have since become. Regardless of their reaction, she continued going about her business of getting divorced. After a few weeks, she went to go see the lawyer she had hired to handle her side of the divorce. While going over paperwork relating to assets, my mom gets the urge to vomit and ducks into a nearby wastebasket. The lawyer looked at her curiously.

“I bet you’re pregnant.” The lawyer smirked while looking nauseated at the vomit in her formerly paper-only trashcan.

“That’s ridiculous, you have to have sex to get pregnant,” my mom replied, quoting what sounds like every romantic comedy about a pregnant woman ever.

“I’m just saying, make sure.”

“It’s probably something I ate.”

Leaving calmly, she freaked out as soon as she got home and made a doctor’s appointment for the next day. She was indeed pregnant. She told my grandmother and said that she wanted to continue with the divorce, that she wanted to raise me alone. My grandmother did not react well to this bit of information and threatened to not be involved in her life if she didn’t give this mystery baby a proper home. Head hanging, my mom went home to tell my dad, who had been sleeping in his den, that she was pregnant.

My dad who was older at this time, almost forty, was over the moon that he was going to be a father. They decided that the universe had taken the decision of ending their marriage out of their hands and so it was. My mom had an uneventful pregnancy with me where she drank a whole gallon of milk per day and got really, really fat and a few months later, I arrived late and healthy with a tiny baby fauxhawk.

My parents remained married for 15 years after I was born. 15 years. They really made a go of it and even though I knew since I was little that they didn’t love each other how my grandparents did or how people did in movies, they cared for each other greatly. They never fought or had disagreements in front of me and until my mom told me one day after school during my freshman year of high school that they were getting divorced, I would have thought that they would just stay content to be sort of in like with each other for the rest of their lives.

It’s weird how things work out. I was my mom’s first and only successful pregnancy. She miscarried something like, five times after I was born, and some late in the pregnancy. I remember her being pregnant when I was little and then nothing. Every Christmas, I would ask for a little brother or sister (to rule over, naturally) and I would always begin to think I was getting my wish sometime in August but then nothing; I just thought I was being punished by Santa for never picking up my toys or something. All the pregnancies that they tried for were literally fruitless and yet, this one random instance of fornication in the mountains produced me, springing from the womb fully formed, personality intact. It’s strange.

I’m glad they stayed married. I used to feel guilty that they stayed together for me, unfulfilled in many ways, but now I can see that we had some good times together. Despite their issues as a couple, we were, we are a family. My dad’s remarried now to an awesome lady and my parents are friends; we all hang out together and it’s the most natural thing in the world. I don’t know if this is common, my experience is perhaps unique. I just had a good time growing up as their tiny sidekick.

I don’t know if I believe that everything happens for a reason but I do to some extent. Things seem to click in place like puzzle pieces at times. I came to be as a bunch of cells in the place where I feel most at peace and I was christened with a name that has seemed to guide my fate in life in certain directions. I grew under the tutelage of two very different but cohesive people who have helped shape my views and opinions and tastes but have left me room to seek knowledge and experiences on my own. It doesn’t really matter how you came to be though, planned with the help of doctors or entirely accidental in a serendipitous way. You will be the product of many things and how you came to exist at this exact moment matters little in the long run. If you weren’t wanted, not even by your parents, someone will want you and at the very least, the universe wanted you and here you are.

I am my mother’s stubborn and passionate dark eyed fire and my father’s wry, wandering dreamer’s heart, filled with the haze and poetry of the mountains. I exist.

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