LOOK. AT. ME. NOTHING. WRONG. AT. ALL. HAHAHA. HA. HA. HA.
I don’t know if I’d take a bulimic to a buffet on the way home from rehab but I figured it’s probably different with abortion, right? The idea was to normalize my days, so I tried. But my dad was flummoxed and seemed certain that I would return home preggos again. Lol. A girl can’t get pregnant from sharing a pizza with a boy. Wait – can she??
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m still basking in the afterglow of flushing my embryonic baby down the toilet last December. And in this time, my mind has become a sort of battleground. Most days I feel like everything and nothing at once, and I’m certain that there’s a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing falls into. It seems crazy and dangerous that nobody has put me in a straitjacket (read: chastity belt) or confiscated my computer yet.
I usually have to put a little distance between myself and the past before I can really understand it – and I use the term “understand” loosely, the way you’d call the 10 steps between your couch and fridge “exercise.” So I rang in the New Year thinking “not this year,” because time heals all wounds, and 2020 seems perfect for processing that sort of thing, and ignorance is bliss – and admittedly, so is denial. But then I had this other thought one day – not an original thought, but it’s better than no thought at all: If there’s just one thing I know to be beautiful and true about life, it’s that it is nothing more than a colourful parade to the grave. JK. It’s that if you aren’t honest with yourself – cuttingly, painfully honest – life can’t be honest with you. And so of my infantile experience thus far of life after an abortion, I have this to say:
Every morning, my mum asks me how I feel and I say, “I won’t be home for dinner this evening,” which is an answer to a question I wasn’t asked. So she asks again. “Stop it,” I snap back with a mouthful of warm porridge.
Emotionally, my anxiety made me brittle and easy to anger. Physically, seven continuous weeks of bleeding had taken its toll on me and if I appeared to be very selective about how I expended my energy, it’s because I was and I still am.
I felt myself retreating from the world like a slow-motion magic trick. Even though everyone reassured me that the passing of time would eventually carry me out of this nightmare towards feelings of joy, I waited many days and had no such feelings.
I used to be horrified by the idea of people telling me what to do or think, but this gesture was something I’d come to greatly appreciate in the last few weeks. And although falling on my own face is nothing new to me, this latest burn ripped my ego apart and shook my sense of self in such a merciless way, I really did not know what to do but to do absolutely nothing. It made the most sense to stop being an active participant in my own life, to become a passive observer instead, after the colossal mess I’d created for myself with my own hands. I had almost no desire or confidence to be present or engaged, only to be presentational, or to pretend.
As you can imagine, I’m beyond French’d out at this moment. Frenchmen, french toast, french kissing… Say it with me: ugh. But much has to be said about the way the French respond to pain and embrace their pain day after day with uncompromising zest for life and admirable poise. FYI, pain means bread in French in case you had the nerve or cluelessness to miss my clever pun.
Despite how tempting it is to surrender to emptiness, to withdraw into the safety of our shells, and to drift away from anything we’d once called familiar whenever tragedy strikes, it’s so important to remain determined to pull something meaningful out of the abyss of dissonance. “Paris is our capital. We love music, drunkenness, joy. For centuries lovers of death have tried to make us lose life’s flavour. They never succeed,” was what French writer and cartoonist Joann Sfar had to say in wake of the massacre last November.
There’s a good chance going back out into the world to reclaim my identity, to reassert who I am and what I stand for, to take back ownership of my life will at some point – or rather, several points – challenge everything I believe to be true about myself and break my heart into more pieces than it was made of. But that’s not anywhere close to the worst thing that can happen to me. Far worse is living a life motivated by fear and ruled by pride.
So, how do I move forward from here? How will I use myself, everything I’ve been given, to serve that which is greater than myself? The only way I know how to, I guess. I’ll find a man I like a lot and have as much amazing sex as humanly possible – obviously with a condom this time. (I think there’s a saying that goes ‘once bitten… please bite me on my arse again, please’ ????) Then I’ll do it again the next day until my legs are so weak and wobbly I can hardly stand up. I’ll tell him what turns me on and ask him what turns him on. I’ll teach him how to touch me so that I have really good orgasms. We’ll stay up ridiculously late telling each other the long stories of our lives. And then meet for ice cream and walks in the park at spontaneous hours of the afternoon. I’ll buy him my favourite Douglas Coupland book and write him SparkNotes inside in a coded, erotically tender language that only the two of us can decipher. When he says, “You’re so beautiful.” (Oh, and he will.) I won’t blush and say, “Thank you.” I’ll ask, “What makes you think that?” And then watch his face very carefully while he answers. It will be fun and interesting and hot and sweet and bloody terrifying all at the same time.
But this is what we’re here for. It’s what we're meant to do in this colourful parade to the grave we call life. Joie de vivre, it’s such a simple – and, it must be said, fundamentally French – idea. How wonderful it is to be alive and how ironic the medium in which this lesson revealed itself.
