4.05 morning after

She is dizzy. Smells make her stomach heave. On her way home from work, in her pretty summer dress, she’s going to have to buy a package wrapped in crinkly clear plastic. She’ll open it up and read instructions on shiny white paper and she’ll follow them and the nervousness will fill her stomach with churning acidic liquid. She’ll see the liquid creep up into the plastic window and she’ll see one line or two, and these tiny lines will tell her what the next fourteen days will bring to her.

The man that she lay with, who was inside her with nothing between them, has silky hair. The inside of his mouth is as soft as his words are hard. I know this because I have lain with him too.

I once woke up with a man who took a phone call from a screaming woman. She knew where he was, who he was with, and did not want him to be there. I had been next to him and under him all night and there were naïve dreams of falling stars in my foggy mind. Our wetness was still between my legs. He turned away and took the call and did not again meet my eye. At that precise moment, something in my heart or my brain or my gut or my soul, or wherever these things live inside, shattered into little pieces of glass. Like the slithers of broken panes of glass that are impossible to sweep up, tiny dangerous little pieces that cut your feet but are invisible.

Since then, I have been an understudy. I have been waiting in the wings. I have been a woman in a fine silk dress hoping for the woman in the spotlight to fall and break the bones of a limb. I am the woman in an apartment in town with new silk stockings and pennyroyal tea in the cupboard.

I found out, one year and forty one days after that morning, that when she made that call she had a tiny curl of a thing inside her. There was a tiny life that was ended not long after.

I know the feeling of waking up in a hospital gown with the part of me that was growing, the part that made me so difficult and troublesome, removed so that I could continue pretending that I’d be pliable and easy to sleep next to. I know what it is to have the desire to just get.it.out suddenly overwhelmed by the grasping scraping rawness of waking up empty in a cold room.

When I think of these things, I see the dark tangled ribbons that join me to women who have not been lucky, have not been loved. I know that I will be hurt by these women and I will hurt them again, just as I know that the men around whom we circle will not be. We dance, like it is the beginning of May, flowers in our hair, each holding a ribbon, and we try to make the ribbons wrap in co-ordinated patterns around the may pole. But we trip each other up and end up tangled. Ribbons are knotted. We have to cut them to get free. We curse each other, again and again, edged frayed, less length in the silken cords every year.