For a time that was not to be

A pause in regular programming

I can’t find a way into my worlds today. It is lassitude, yes. It is a certain refusal, a resistance of my imagination on behalf of my body. I am speechless, my voice has swallowed itself and bellows at a low hum in the cavernous place my uterus lines. I can hear the faintest wind of her howling, it would give me chills if this numbness would fade away. I am back in that moment, those moments, when my body was taken against my will. I revisit the silence, the fog, the inability to express through the string that abruptly wired my jaw shut. It is weighty, to be confronted with the ease with which I accepted hard won rights. The breeziness, and entitlement of it. But today, beyond the guilt, beyond the facts and the regrets, which I will feel and do feel as layers of this terrible day, today is pain, blank pain and consternation. There is no point to what I am writing here, no call to justice for I cannot even hear myself over the inadequacy of my voice. I am at the crossroads of inaction and survival, of allowing myself to have children in a society that has just revoked a fundamental right of some half of its population. I am at a crossroads, sitting in an idling car, listening to the screams of celebration from people for whom belief is not enough. People for whom their own freedom is not enough. People for whom happiness is synonymous to imposition. I wonder then, how it feels to be that person, presiding over submission with no challenge. Do they know they are cruel? They don’t care, is the answer. It is always the answer. And yet here I am, one who cares, and I have done nothing. It is not poetic. It is not pity. It is naïveté, a tenacious hope born out of a life of winning lotteries. And now I begin to know what hope feels like when it is torn from the golden threads of a human heart. I am introduced to the pain that is centralized nowhere, and disseminates itself through the very veins of the vessel that bears it. I feel the hands of strangers, hairy, clawed with greed, rummaging up my center like a Thanksgiving turkey, deciding if there’s something worthy. The eyes glaze over. The hundreds of thousands if not millions of women that will die flash before my wintry eyes. Those who will be confronted with impossible decisions…thinking of those little girls born with such power and having it sucked away before they can learn how to drive themselves. Those souls trapped, those future dancers and singers and painters and lawyers, doctors, celibates, free and equal, unburdened women. It is not possible. Not possible, not possible. It is the nightmare, when few evils destroy all progress. I say to those women cheering on their own demise, keep your babies. Don’t abort them if you happen to get pregnant even if you don’t want to be. Be miserable, or happy, or have your “life changed” in the “best way” by a new human. But leave the rest of us alone. Leave us alone to a society that doesn’t support birth anyway. Leave us alone to navigate that how and when we want to. We are not murderers because our bodies do something they’ve been given the power to do against our will. We are not whores because people choose to have their way with us. We are not sluts because we enjoy pleasure for the sake of it. We are not unworthy of equality simply because we carry the burden of humanity. You are unworthy. I keep trying to make a sentence to describe you, who have made, supported, advocated for, and lied for this decision. But I keep erasing, because you are unbefitting of words themselves. No letters of the alphabet we cheerfully learn as growing children deserve to be soiled with the disgrace of your description. Take a hard look in the mirror, mind your fucking business, and just leave the rest of us be.