Last night I drank or drunk a drink. I live in a flat with eight housemates. I am not pregnant in the normal way.
Today I wore five outfits. The first was too itchy, the second too pink, the third too small. The fourth was a dress so short it showed my underwear but I did not know until one of my housemates (Kate) said ‘ass!’ loudly behind me while I was climbing up the stairs. It turns out she was not referring to my ass but rather the ass of a different housemate (Andrea) who had just gone for a run and come back golden. However the comment of ‘ass’ prompted me to reflexively cover myself and retreat to my room and remove and replace my darling dress. This room is small and cracking at the corners. This room is the one I used to share with another housemate (Kate) but she left, and blurred out, or perhaps she soon will.
My eyes are stinging terribly because I have been reading for the whole day, wasting long whiles on websites. I have been in my bed beneath my covers because the light hurts my eyes and because my legs feel like stones for hours at a time, with brief intervals when they feel like cotton and I am able to traverse stairs. However, those moments of lightness are rare. What I drank still has not worn off, so I am barely able to move. I can sit up and type. For a while I went outdoors and lay on the ground on the grass in the sun in only a thin two-piece swimsuit like I had seen my housemates do. I felt suddenly privy to some secret chamber of girlhood I had not been aware of before. I felt free. It is hard to feel free when you are pregnant.
I also do not generally show my skin outdoors, because it makes me feel guilty. There is also risk involved in any kind of self exposure, and the physical kind is no exception because it is quite easy for a girl to provoke an attack. I do not want to provoke an attack. And yet still, last night I drunk a drink.
I returned to the inside. The door closed. I did one load of laundry. The stairs moved beneath my knees like jelly. When I started the cycling machine, it whispered to me that my stomach was nearly ripe. I ran the load over and over until the water ran red. Began another.
I do not know how I am pregnant, but it is not in the normal way. I do not connect with any person in a carnal way nor do I have desire to. I have not made any sort of wet fleshy contact, nor was any such contact made on me against my will. But still there is a little life growing inside me. I will keep drinking things and see how they affect it, because I fear it is alien, and that it means harm. And yet my own flesh has fed it and housed it and enclosed it; and yet it has grown within the chamber of my body. And since it is of me, since it grows from me, it makes me more than I was, and I shall not part with it. If I poison it, then it was weak to begin with. If it survives me, it deserves to.
As a being, I am much lesser than my eight housemates. They have a flair and a function that I do not. They smile easily, with teeth, and can contort their personalities. I cannot articulate what it is that makes them wonderful, but yet there is something I lack. An inflection when I speak. A cadence to a condolence. A lilt to a lighthearted laugh.
I watch them as they move, and I can converse effectively, but I keep many things within. I have mostly stopped eating to focus on the drinks I buy; to curate or cure my stomach. I have certainly weakened as a result of depriving myself of food, and it has affected my vision too, because lately the eight young women I live with have begun to glow like light. Kate Andrea Ritu Kimmie Maya Carla Ivy Grace. Grace Ivy Carla Maya Kimmie Ritu Andrea Kate. While I am crumpled and collapsing like a kaleidoscope curled inward they are becoming bright. They are, quite simply, ahead of me.
When I see Kate I taste smooth and silky chocolate. Andrea’s easy motion is a bonfire’s warmth. Ritu’s voice is the scent of cherry blossoms lofted lightly by a breeze. Kimmie’s laugh is a colourful kite dart-dancing in winnowing wind; it - and she - could be nothing else. Maya’s singing is the sensation of a game when won: a startling satisfaction. Carla’s steps on the stairs veer into smugness, mixing with mud in my teeth and my tongue, but I face her with fierceness and frenzy. Ivy is ice-cream on a hot day, all of her, captured like lush lovely lemon melting meekly in the mouth. Grace is simply grace, and light springs unceasingly from her fingertips. Come winter she will be crowned with holly berries and buried underground.
As you can see I may have some strange monster in my mind to couple with the beast within my body. The books I bring claim to convince me there may have been a butchery, a bartering, a bargain, where I was made its bridle or its bride. A creature with its claws in my dark and doleful dreams. A price must be paid for pure imagination, and I held on to mine for far too long. I did not grow up in time. I was caught still dreaming.
I began to live inside myself, I fear, and now everything outside me seems like a puzzle piece I don’t fit around, or a rock that I am battering and shattering against. I am tissue; I am a crumpled candy wrapper; I am not like other people any more.
What I have to give, I will give to what grows of me. Energy emerging. There is a moroseness to the entity that settles around my brain, and I believe I bear an infant sadness. Dolorosa, Matryoshka, Mariposa; the christened chrysalis, coming.
My laundry load is clear and near completion, as am I. The walls whisper that I am burgeoning to burst, and soon I will split open like pulped pears and gush out gold and glorious. Sundays are Kate’s day to clean the kitchen and I do hope it will not be terrible trouble for her. If it is, she can save it for Monday. Mondays are my duty-day to tidy, and I will be quite good at cleaning myself up.
Take a mop and take a broom, get a recycling bin.
Pick me up and scare me, tear me, pare me, pack me in.
I am almost due. I am terrified and typing; I am struck and scarred and scared. Fear vexes my viscous vicious veins and throngs within my throat. I am doing what thorny thinking I am currently capable of. I believe now that what was forced inside me was the growing up I never got to do. It will staunch my slipping spirit. It will vanquish me and vanish me. The silky chocolate and the bonfire’s warmth and the cherry blossoms and the colourful kite and the startling satisfaction and the mud and the frenzy and the melting lemon and the grace-light-glory, gone.
Once it happens, I will make my child-self very small, and I will eat her. Thus will I endure.
Kate is in the kitchen, placing out a pot and pan. I’m made maid and mother; I’ll be merry, if I can.