Plathological

baby, baby, i love you

Having booklets of stamps and stacks of privacy-lined envelopes around the house is a good idea – if your condom breaks after some particularly vigorous intercourse and the white South African doctor you see the next morning about an emergency contraceptive treats you like someone who’s there to colonize for old time’s sake, you can politely say excuse me and leave the clinic in tears and, after swallowing an obscene level of hormones in the café bathroom across the street, can type, seal and send a letter of complaint to the medical Registrar in Vancouver right away. Within a couple hours, you will feel redeemed. And proud that the letter wasn’t the least bit whiny, melodramatic, or overwrought. You have a witness, you use the word misconduct – you don’t mention the doctor’s heritage, though keep the sneer like a plugged yard hose bulging with water in the back of your mind. You make your voice heard in the system for the first time since you started to feel victimized by its faults. You hate babies and small life - the doctor could or could not sense this, your face unloaded blanks the entire meeting.

An afternoon passes, another night, and you wake, perhaps still drunkenly after the 2-6 of vodka, your boyfriend beside you and for a moment think you were sleeping next to a butcher the whole night – his white collard shirt’s covered in dried blood. The source of the carnage is his now bandaged finger and all he remembers is the initial sensation of pain after you'd lightly collapsed, unwakeable through shaking, into bed, then the run to the bathroom to clean the wound. The initial cut has fallen outside memory’s parameters. Neither of you spends too much time thinking about the possible cause of the slice. Both too weak to stand, you fall back asleep, and you, at the very least, still waiting for the first signs of any of the grave hormonal side-effects you were warned about in the accordion folds of the baby-blue pamphlet that accompanied the two nearly impossible to unseal pills – nothing comes, save for a brief, heavy feeling in the abdomen that normally accompanies a period. Each time it dissipates as soon as you say the thing – the sensation – aloud. The numb impression of a wet, curling animal, and it’s gone as fast as it's named. Yet another day passes and the radio says Heresy - the word comes from the Greek meaning, 'To Choose'. You cannot legislate morals in a material world. All sacraments replaced with the subtle tenets of matter, a limited ceremony.