PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

       It wasn’t my favorite position.  Head first into the toilet.  The undusted, beige limbs of the hanging curtains submitted to the invading light. It was morning.  This a.m., my tears assimilated themselves with the vomit in the endless porcelain pit.  After the last drop, it swallowed my emotions in one flush.  Swish.  Gurgle.  Silence. And all evidence of it was gone until the next morning.  



      The test.  A soft pink, the color of a perfect cherub, assembled itself in a narrow line along the ivory screen. A sadistic snake sweeping swiftly and  savoring every last sound that begged to squeeze through my throat.  Shock, a needle numbness  mopped over my skin.  No tears.  No cries.  Not yet.



      But I didn’t believe it was true.  The air conditioning of the clinic pierced my bones like nails.  The emotionless, white walls matched my face, battered and still, except my frantic eyes that darted  like hummingbirds to the clock and then to my feet, and then to a familiar face that I wish wouldn’t have recognized me.  The ivory cubical was the inside of an eggshell, and at any moment it was going to shatter to pieces and cave in on me, but at least then it would bury my dreams alive, and I could forget them as ancient rubble.  But it was just my luck that that wasn’t the case.  A nasally voice grumbled my name to temporarily rescue me from the white dungeon.  



      "Vanessa."  The echo of it was enough to persuade me to change my name.  "Pee in the cup and then place it on the table."  I acquiesced to the impersonal procedure.



      The waiting room swallowed me back into its hollow stomach, that same pair of familiar eyes greeting me with a "Now I know why you‘re here" look.  My head spun with nausea , a frigid sweat that made my thin brown hairs cling to my neck.  



      When she called me in to the suffocated office of a brown UPS package, I sat calmly and expectedly on a sofa, undoubtedly someone’s once-prized relic from the seventies.  A chipped wooden clip board held a single half sheet of crisp white paper.  Her eyes were gray to the results printed on the page, knowing and jaded to the frequent outcome.  She placed the clip board on the table, my eyes attached like silly putty to the black ink words and numbers.  "Vanessa Bodeen.  Result of pregnancy test: positive.  Due date: April 5, 2005."  A landslide erupted in my lungs, and I forgot to breathe.  Hot pain like lava hardened in my heart, every beat splitting the very vessel into crumbs.



      I was ready to feed my Maria Carrillo yearbooks to the flames, and forget the green and gold life as a Puma.  I was already deemed an outcast to the high school society.  There was no room for six periods plus advocacy in my life anymore.  I could imagine the disappointment in my teachers’ eyes.  They would try to hide it so that it was invisible, but I would know without ungluing my eyes from my toenails that burrowed into the soft foam of my flip-flops what they thought.  I wouldn’t let it get that far.  I would just disappear, and think to myself that no one would miss me.  It was a good enough rationale at the time to throw away the report cards and academic achievement awards, all evidence that I was ever in school for the past twelve years.  I was having a baby.



      I didn’t know how to tell him.  For the last two months, all I could remember was the sunburst overlooking a cerulean ocean in his eyes, calm and adoring.  As the words fumbled drunkenly out of my mouth, two overcast skies settled into a pair of emotionless pits pressed into his fair face.  A whirlwind of words I didn’t want to hear swirled into my ears, the reality of the difficulty of being a teen parent suddenly dropped on me like a boulder.  He didn’t want me to keep it.  I could read the fine writing in between the lines of his face, and he only wished that I would follow it like a map.  But I couldn’t kill it.  To put the sunshine back into his eyes, I would do most anything, but I had grown accustom to the changes in my body that accommodated the growing life, like my jeans pinching me with more malice daily as my hips expanded.



      More than anyone, my pillow consoled me and hugged me in its cotton weaves soaked with a puddle of salt water.  His ocean eyes staring at me with hope and pleading created a tidal wave of cries through my torso, and I would wrap my knees to my chest, as if to protect my belly from it being taken away from me.  



      One night, my tears nearly outnumbered the gush of vomit into the toilet.  The gray walls of my bedroom twirled like a kamikaze, and shutting my eyes sent me into an endless spinning black pit, like falling into a bottomless well.  My fingers crept helplessly over my nightstand, a lost and hopeless nomad in the desert.  I blindly dialed his number, the receiver drooping from my spaghetti noodle hands.  At the click of his phone and the soft whisper of his drowsy voice, I wept like a widow and begged for him to hold me and tell me everything would be alright, even if it was a lie.  Harsh, reprimanding words followed by a prompt goodnight and a dial tone sent me into a fitful sleep, full of indecision and loneliness.  The fear of being left alone with a fatherless child flickered into a possible reality.  I touched my stomach, and I knew that the tug-of-war was grinding to a halt on its jagged rope.  



      I made the phone call from my closet, murmuring to the receptionist that I wanted to get a medical abortion.  The date was set, and I struggled to tie my tongue into an intricate knot to seal the truth from him.  Every last dollar of my paycheck was safe kept for a hefty deposit for the procedure.



      But it wasn’t really a procedure.  I corralled myself into the waiting room of yet another clinic, but this time this clinic was decorated with false happinesses captured in  wooden frames, splashed with bright colors and polished to perfection.  Multiple sheets with mazes of black ink and lines with ominous x’s filled my lap, and the breath from the lady sitting nervously next to me filtered down my collar.  The lady to the left, I noticed, was filling out the same set of intimidating papers, but she was comforted by a soft rub upon her shoulders and reassuring words from the man whom I didn’t doubt was the father.  I was alone.



      All it took was a simple white pill that I took with a paper Dixie cup on top of an exam table.  My fingertips trembled instinctively to drop it, but my tongue wrestled the intruder into submission in the pit of my stomach.  

                                                                ~*~*~



      I knocked at his door.  No answer.  Twisting the bronze knob to his bedroom, his broad back faced me, his nose burrowed into a book like a mouse in a nest.  The soft sapphire and pale pink lettering popped out from the yellow cover like a prairie dog.  "Baby Names."  At my faint footsteps, he twirled around in his computer chair with a surprising grin.



      "I’ve been thinking," he said.  "What do you think about the name Mariah?"  My heart shuddered and stalled.  He had given in and was ready to be a father.  But what I had already done was irreversible.  The future was written in ink, and even the most effective rubber eraser could not change what was already decided.  



     "That’s a great name," I choked with a smile as dim and phony as an eclipsed sun.  But the glare of his own excitement blinded him to the evidence of what I had done that was burned into my face.



                                                                 ~*~*~



      I marked the next two merciless nights with no sleep and as many glittering tears like stars to fill the sky three times over.  The Friday morning came when I had to force myself to complete the abortion that was already in progress with four more faceless tablets that still seemed to sneer at me.

  

      The cramps bombarded me, grenades in my gut.  No one could know, though, so I suffered in silence, advertising to my mother that is was nothing more than a bad period that a heat pad and some Advil couldn’t fix.  My insides tore away from me, a red river of blood clots flowing into the toilet, the creation we so carefully crafted with love easily destroyed with a small white pill.  My blood of liquid rubies cascaded from me, and I was empty, lifeless and more alone than I could have ever imagined.  I knew it was gone, flushed down the toilet like a lifeless goldfish from the fair.  I used to cry over goldfish, but this was beyond expression of tears and sobs.



      For three weeks, my body was wounded, bleeding, and the light at the end of the tunnel was just a dull light bulb in a drizzling rain.  There was no opening, a way out to forget and move on.  The hope was little more than a mirage, a broken promise of a better life after the fact.  All that I was living for was erased by a simple and selfish fear of being left alone by the man I loved.  The secret has swelled until now when I finally burst from the pressure to wrestle my tongue from screaming to the world a diary of my emotions.  



      Babies and car seats make me cry.  Sometimes I will shut my eyes and wish to take April 5, 2005, off of the calendar forever so I don’t have to count the twenty-four hours in a day that shames me.  Every time I see his face, I imagine the same blue eyes that our baby would have probably had, and they would stare at me with that changing ocean tide through the roller coaster of emotions for the next eighteen years.  But I find little use in imagining now because fairytales don’t ever happen in real life.  I can’t rewind my life and change the decision I made.  I can tell my story, but a story can not illustrate what it is like to be me, but at least I don’t have to look into a pair of eyes and wonder if they can see my secret.  It’s not a secret anymore.