Everything must be different

Joris's words continued to fester inside me like an abscess for days afterward as I grew sicker and sicker. I lay in bed, musing on the similarities between pregnancy and mental illness. As I was assaulted by the almond scent of fabric softener in the sheets, a perfume I'd never before resented but now poisonously filled my nostrils, a childhood game welled up. I closed my eyes and said to myself, "Me, me, me." Like a mantra, I kept repeating the word. It was a trick I used to use at bedtime to ward off my fear of the violence in the living room. My father's thunderous voice. The shattering of glass. My mother's moans—would she still be alive tomorrow? So I said, "Me, me, me," until a twinkling starry sky unfolded in my mind, and I was stunned into realizing that I truly was me, that I couldn't be any more me. But no matter how obsessively I played the game during those long, bedridden days, the starry splendor failed to materialize. All I saw before me was a medical chair under a bright yellow theater spotlight and an embryo, curled into a ball, clamped between rusty tongs. I couldn't see who was holding the tongs. I vaguely thought I recognized Joris's fingernails.