I feel Afraid

Tonight I feel afraid. I feel afraid of being found out. I walked through the bookstores and I was afraid of these books, the ones that focused on these women, with their large portions and their female parts. My biggest fear is visiting a gynecologist, them telling me I am crazy, strange, broken, bad, unlike anything they've ever seen before. I imagine they would stop in their tracks and scream at me, telling me to get out of there, or worse, tell me I can't leave. I fear they would tell me to come back, tying me to them interminably. It would be like a horror film inside a romantic comedy, the worst combination.

I stopped and read a few words on the back of this one book, and I couldn't go further in. It had to do with my eating lettuce, I'm sure, and the coconut bar thingy too. I had lots of apple today, some decaf espresso, green tea, I mean the list goes on and on of the bad things I have every day. The ones that make me a bad person. I feel TERRIBLE for these things. I feel TERRIBLE for purchasing lettuce like it's the one and only source of life. It isn't and I know this. It is just a comfort food, my replacement for bread. Most people buy all kinds of bread EVERY SINGLE DAY and me? I buy lettuce, for I cannot have bread. Why? I'm not exactly sure why.

I hate the life of women. I don't know why either. I wonder at the very brokenness of their lives, the day to day brokenness that latches onto them like locks on a prison door. I don't understand why I feel so very bound by it, the weight, the hanging skin, the interminable illness of living so fragile an existence that in one second your life can completely whip around and hit you in the face. I dislike it. I wish I didn't...I wish I could embrace it like the other women I know, the ones who take pictures of everything and cry and embrace and have sex and yearn and believe in having children and who have them. I wish I could see things differently, but I don't know how. I fear the doctor and I don't know how to get over that fear but to face it, but I also hate the thought of the doctor. What in the world is it for but to confine? To regulate, to measure me into submission to the norm of society. I hate it. I want it to go away forever.

Do you think mama agrees with me? Do you think that she knows how it feels to not want to go to the doctor? How did she go and submit herself a bazillion times where the baby in her bellies curled up and beat their hearts whilst the doctor and nurses crowded around. The bleeding and screaming, the cries and wails of both mother and child. I imagine the scene in my head, but the reality of it is strangely far from me. I am like a little autistic child in the corner of a room with the idea of it so loud, so biting, and the reality so far...it is amazing how that can happen, the biting sense of what can be, what is possible, but what is not true.

That is it, the corner of life is where I want to stand, safe in its arms. And yet, its arms are completely bare and so cold. No wonder I am cold all the time, I huddle up against metal and wood, not burning it, but letting it be stark against my skin that bubbles and mumbles. Of course. Of course. I wish I could just be better at life and the rest would fall into place. I suppose that's kind of what God promises. If I just look at the steps in front of me and walk them, letting the rest be given to Him for forgiveness...that's when I will be happiest, even when under the most pressure and pain.

Pain.

What is that anyway, how does one define that? And why is it there? Tears.