I stare at the ceiling and realize I don’t even know if it’s morning or night. My throat feels burning and dry.
The doctor’s voice is calm. He stands near the foot of the bed, speaking in low, careful tones, words that feel like they belong to someone else.
He asks how I’m feeling. If I can listen. He asks a few more questions I struggle to answer.
“—there was a complication,” he says.
Something inside me fractures. A clean split straight through the center of me. The rest of his words dissolve into a blur:
hemorrhage... complications... emergency surgery... abdominal hysterectomy...
timelines... recovery... condolences...
They don’t sound like words. They sound like a distant, muffled drone, like I’m underwater, too far from the surface to breathe.
Before he leaves the room, the doctor asks if I want to speak to a counselor or a social worker.
I stare past him… at the ceiling, the fluorescent light, anywhere but his pity.
What would that change?
What would anyone say that could make this hurt less?
There’s nothing left to save.
My hand drifts to my abdomen, where there’s only emptiness now.
I blink once. Twice.
And then the tears come again.Because there’s nothing left to hold onto.
My eyes sting from crying, but I can’t stop staring at the white ceiling tiles above me. Every one of them feels like a countdown. To what, I don’t even know.
It was all for nothing.
The thought hits me so suddenly that I almost laugh. A broken, bitter sound that dies halfway through my throat.
All for nothing.
I did everything right.
Every stupid, desperate thought I ever convinced myself to believe. I followed all of it.
If I just loved him enough. If I just gave him everything.
He wouldn’t leave me. He would choose me.
I remember the day a girl from college told me her secret.
“Always keep the condoms somewhere warm,” she said, whispering like it was divine knowledge.
She had been dating a quarterback who was about to be drafted into the NFL. “It helps, you know” she laughed, “makes it more likely.”
I thought she was crazy. And then I became her.
When Colin started leaving condoms in my drawer, the first month after we started sleeping together, I did the same thing.
I moved them to the top shelf near the vent that blasted warm air in winter, I used to turn it on every day, just long enough. My secret insurance.
