The Layering of Stories

My aunt had an abortion. And then my mother had one. And now it is my turn. I wonder about the repetition of history. If it is somehow a cycle I was destined to repeat.

When my aunt tells me about sliding her feet into those stirrups, it is my own toes I see in the cold metal. My own orange nail polish glows back at me, unexpectedly bright amidst the whites and grays of the sterile medical environment. When my mother tells me how her heart fell clear to the floor when she found out she was pregnant, I think back to my own moment of reckoning, when I saw the grainy plus sign slowly appear on the plastic pregnancy test. My heart dropped straight into my uterus.

And then I evacuated my heart.

Or maybe it had already been evacuated. Perhaps the cheating son of a bitch who managed to get me pregnant without ever once telling me he loved me had already stolen it. Perhaps my heart had already been taken, rolled up, batted around, and left to linger among his dirty t-shirts. He never would pick up anything off the floor without a shove, and even then, only grudgingly.

I look at my floor, at my own t-shirts sprinkled like big, floppy, rose petals on the dark wood. Perhaps I am repeating his story as well. I absorb the people in my life. Their habits, stories, and experiences become my own. And I wonder, am I just a compilation of those I have met?

inspired by the beautiful and emotional read, A Topography of Her Abortion