Hello dear Reader,
Welcome back to So as Not to Get Lost. This week I have written a fictional short story that found me one night after the baby had finally fallen asleep. We are going on one week sober from the pacifier and I’m not going to lie, bed time has been really rough. Accidentally conceived in the dark pages of Jotterpad, the writing app I have been using since I was in high school, Bleeding Girl moved onto a more serious Google doc where I labored and birthed her until she was ready to be sent off to the world via SANTGL on Substack.
Enjoy, and thank you for being here!
You are a girl, sitting on a toilet and there is a dull, continuous ache in your lower abdomen. There is blood coming out of you, from the part of your body where you have been advised never to look and especially not to touch. You are a girl of twelve years of age and the bleeding won’t stop. You wipe and you wipe, and watch as a pool of bright red dissolves the paper away. And the dull constant ache sometimes feels like a stabbing in your belly, like a small electric current shocking you in ceaseless waves and valleys. You have no name for this thing that is happening to you, but you are certain it is death. You are dying. You tell no one of your dying, you wad up toilet paper and place it in your underwear. And you return to your room and lie on your bed and wait to bleed out, to die, weeping quietly into your pillow.
You don’t die, and the bleeding eventually stops. And you learn in your physical education class months later, when the teachers separate the boys from the girls and take you to a separate room to watch a video about your body, that the bleeding came from your uterus. The girls squeal and recoil from the robotic voice on a bulky tv floating above your heads in the corner of the PE room. It tells you about tampons and pads and how to use them. But all you can think about is all of the toilet paper you wadded up in your underwear for months, waiting to die. The bleeding was not a death but rather a changing, a blooming. A new life set before you. You are a girl and you are a bleeding one now.
You are a teenager now, and you remember how much you wanted to be a teenager. They looked so grown up and so cool, cooler than the adults. There is longing in your belly radiating from the parts of your body they advised you never to look at and especially not to touch. And you wonder what mystery lies there, what dangers await your discovery. And you slip your fingers between your thighs, to feel the warmth of the parts of your body your mother told you are forbidden and never to be known, or looked at, or touched. And when you are finished discovering this dark place, this sweet abyss you feel unease and regret almost immediately. You wait for God to come down from the prickly popcorn ceiling of your bedroom. To strike you. You picture him watching you like Santa Clause does every December with a list in his hand, shaking his head at you, his brows furrowed and his thin lips pressed tightly in disgust, your name being written there for what you have just done. And then you realize that you don’t care. You bleed for five days without dying and your bleeding comes every quarter moon, you are closer to God than they led you to believe.
You are a woman now and you realize that the bleeding has stopped. First there is panic and then a strange curiosity about the workings of the universe within the very fleshy walls of your body. You wait for the bleeding to come, and it doesn’t. Every time you sit on the toilet you wipe and the bleeding has yet to come. You tell no one of this gap in your cycle, you look up the current phase of the moon and realize just how late you are.
In a white room, you piss in a cup and then hand it to a thin white lady with blonde hair. While you wait for the results she takes you into another white room with two beige sofas sitting directly in front of each other where she settles her long body before you. There is dull art on the walls and some fake plants by the window, the kind only hospitals and clinics buy, with a film of dust and dread. She is unusually happy. She asks about you. About the father of the cells multiplying in your womb. You tell her you love him and that he loves you and this makes her really happy. She is beaming, glowing, the orbs of her eyes, a glistening blue locked into your face, digging around in your soul. She asks when you will be married and you lie and tell her in the spring. When the weather is perfect, when the world feels brand new, when the birds prepare their nests and lay their eggs in the branches of blooming trees. She asks if you are happy. You picture this in your mind to make sure the lie comes out as true as possible. You think about what an odd question that is and wonder why it takes so long for a pregnancy test to be processed. But you tell her you are. She takes your hands in the cold, boney palms of hers and asks if she can pray for you. Dread fills your belly now which has split into two sections; one where your womb has swelled and the other where your organs like the intestines have pushed themselves up and made themselves smaller, untethered from one another, compressed in the polar opposites of your torso. She closes her eyes and begins to pray for you, her grip around your hands tightening. You look around the room and realize there is a mahogany wood Jesus nailed to a mahogany wood cross hung up on the wall directly behind you. There are framed pictures of happy, chubby, blue eyed babies there too.
When she is finished praying, she leads you out into the corridor and leaves to grab the results. While you wait, you catch a glimpse of a wall of shelves, there are baskets filled with knitted baby hats and baby blankets in a variety of colors. Above the shelves there is a sign that simply reads, “Welcome.” After a few more minutes, the lady returns with a warm piece of paper where it tells you that you are pregnant and the estimated age of your fetus. She is beaming at you, pushing your stiff body over to a counter with another woman just like her, except her hair is a deep brown and her eyes do not meet yours. They schedule you for an ultrasound. As you are walking toward the door she tells you she will keep praying for you. You leave, and step outside to a noisy street and a white sky. The world swells toward your womb, toward the life forming inside you. And you are not happy but you are also not sad.
Nine months have passed, there is water leaking from the parts of you that you have become acquainted with. There is a burning in your belly that wraps itself tightly around your waist and in between your thighs. You are cast over a small bed with itchy white sheets, in a brightly lit, cold and white room. There are women whose fingers are in and out of your vagina pushed in all the way to the knuckle rushing in and out through loud, double doors. They tell you it’s time. You tell them the medicine they stabbed into your back is not working. They tell you it is too late.
A woman with short blonde hair and deep plum colored scrubs holding a clipboard rushes into the room to your bedside. She hands you a black ink pen and reads you line for line what they are charging you for before she gets to the total. A fire ignites from the parts of your body you are learning are more powerful than God, maybe more than Santa Clause and that fucking list. You sign your name with a shaky fist.
“Would you like to make a payment right now?” The bitch nurse pulls out a little white tablet, the screen blaring at you, the price in bold, black and italics. She nudges it toward your face. You let the fire rip through your body waiting for it to consume you, to kill you. She stands there stiffly, the little glass tablet hovering between you and her as your knuckles turn white from your grip on the railing. There is so much noise but you don’t hear it. The only voice you recognize is the voice of the man that put you in this room, in this moment, before this bitch nurse begging you for coins.
“Fuck. Off.” You say through clenched jaw and gritted teeth. And she does, unphased, as if being told to is part of her job. The room is now swelling toward the human preparing its way out of your womb. And you have become a pit of fire, every inch of you burning up.
You are dying. You tell them that you are dying and they tell you that you are not. “I’m dying!” you scream but it doesn’t sound like you. There is an animal in your throat. You make noises that don’t sound human, that don’t sound like you. Who are you? The fire has consumed you and your body is being ripped to shreds all at once. The doctors, and the nurses and the man that loves you talk to you in a high pitched voice like they’re talking to a baby and you fucking hate them for it. They tell you it’s coming. They tell you they see the head and that it is full of hair they. You are not dead. You feel you are burning alive, being ripped in half, you feel the shoulders and then the limbs of a body exiting yours. The weight of your soul returns to your body, your body returns to you. The fire has settled. They place this naked, screaming appendage, piece of you, your organ, your beating heart on your bare chest. Their skin on your skin taking the same breath. And you cry.
And you realize that you are God. And the whole world lies there on your bare chest. The man that loves you kisses your baby, his voice is strange and full of emotion. You think he is crying. You think this is all life has ever been. This moment.
You are a mother now, you are sitting on the toilet and there is a dull, continuous ache throughout your whole body. There is blood in your giant diaper of a pad. There is cold water in a peri bottle next to the hospital bathroom sink, you squeeze its belly to rinse the blood off the parts of you that don’t look like they belong to you anymore. And your own belly has deflated, it is a slab of loose skin and it is swollen at the same time. You stand up to meet your puffy, unfamiliar face in a large glass mirror. Everything is so strange, like a dream you cannot distinguish from reality.
At night, it is just you and this fragile being existing outside of each other for the first time. They feed and you give, willingly, it is your duty. Your entire body demands it of you. Their cry you have known in your bones for centuries, it is primal, it is the most important call of your life. Every cry is the most important call of your life. And so you go to it. In the dark. In your dreams. To place its tiny mouth upon your breasts, your dark and bloody, raw nipples. Against all odds, against the blood, against the stabbing pain of your uterus contracting with every activation of every milk duct in your veiny, painful breasts. They tell you all of this is normal. They tell you that your pain and your sadness, it's all normal and it is a part of loving. Your body releases oxytocin at its highest levels when your body touches their tiny, fragile body. That is the chemical of love and you are so high off it and that is normal. So you feed, every feeding the most important feeding of your life. Your body is life. Your body is God.
Imagine all of the wombs you have traveled through to get here, to become yourself a vessel for life. All of the revolutions, all of the pain, all of the grief, all of the wombs that survived for you to be here. Imagine what they went through, violence, colonization, war, famine, genocide. Wombs: portals through time and space, always and forever. You, a girl, a woman, a mother. You bearer of the womb. God.
You are an old woman, and it is not as you had imagined. You live in a small, one bedroom apartment in a city across from the one you grew up in. You wander the complex, watching the people living inside their boxes through their patio sliding doors. Sitting in front of their tv screens on beige or gray couches, cooking meals in their tiny kitchens. You watch them leave their boxes for work, rushing their children behind them, time a constricting rope around their pulsing necks. You watch them go to the pool and swim in their young, abled bodies, the smell of burgers and hot dogs wafting in the air while they cook and eat and gather.
You call your children but it goes to voicemail every time. They do not call. You walk down the street to the entertainment plaza, where your sons said you would have plenty of things to do, and you go to the movie theater. You buy a ticket for a movie you don’t really care about and order popcorn and a coke. You sit down to watch a movie alone. And you have grown accustomed to the shadows of loneliness and its pull at your stiff limbs. The way they tug and tug at the end of your bed every night and the way they fog over every day, as they melt into each other. Dawn and dusk, all the same. When the movie is over, you realize you didn’t even watch it.
Outside, the sky is dark and looming like the box of your apartment you must return to. A sinking hole the size of an ocean settles into your stomach, you look at your hands and do not recognize them. Two floating appendages standing before you. And you scream at them to get away from you but they don’t listen. You close your eyes hoping to open them and see they have disappeared but they don’t.
You walk back toward the white and aqua blue complex across the street hoping that by the time you return your dreadful box they will have left you alone. You walk with a fear clinging to your back, the hairs on your neck standing straight up. When you reach the complex, you see the girl and her boyfriend who just moved in holding a small black car seat standing by their car in the lot. You run to them, realizing as you reach them that you cannot tell them about the ghost hands trying to kill you. Instead, you yell in a voice that does not sound like yours but a whimpering animal’s. “I was watching a movie and I lost track of time and it was dark when I left!” They look at you confused and startled. “Are you okay?” says the young woman whose face is baby-like and too young to be a mother. You ask that she call your sons for you and you pull out your black flip phone out of your bag and tell her their names. She takes it and clicks the buttons and squints at the screen and calls your eldest. He does not answer. She calls your youngest son and when he answers she explains that you are frightened, a bit confused, and it would probably be best that he come to you now. You can hear his voice, shaky and embarrassed. He apologizes to her and tells her that you do this all of the time. You, always making excuses to make them rush over to your one bedroom apartment, to drag them away from their life, to bear witness to yours. To spend time with you.
You feel an ache inside you, an ache deep in the aging of your bones and you let yourself fall to the ground, to the freshly paved asphalt. You smell its putrid tarry smell, you feel the cold rush of something spilling out of your head like a continuous rush of gentle cold water. You bring your knees to your chest, there is so much noise but you don’t hear any of it. You are dying. You are finally dying. There is relief in the all consuming fear of your death, it is the most alive you have felt since your sons moved you into that one bedroom apartment they haven’t stepped foot in since they left you there. Sweet, sweet death. Where you release all you once were, all of it is gone. There is nothing, there is no morning sun rising in the morning to remind you of your tired skin and your loneliness. Yes, your loneliness is gone now. You are dying and you do not feel lonely, no. There it is, time has ceased to have meaning. Light begins to fade, the darkness does not frighten you. It reminds you of what you used to think outer space was when you were just a girl, a darkness so gentle, a darkness you can rest in.
You rest now. You are now everything and nothing all the same. You are the cosmos and the tarry asphalt and the blood spilling out onto it. You will remain there always, even when they clean it up. They will always know that you died there.
Your body is lying on the ground and you are no longer there. Yes, this is the place you forgot you would return to. Before you is a little transparent glass screen, it plays every moment of your life. You sit down and you watch. You cry, and you laugh, and you feel everything and the gentle caress of the womb of the universe, her motherly spirit loving you back to the All. The All, is a cosmic womb transcending time and space, it is all it has ever been.
You are atoms and particles, you are everything now too. You are God.
When making these collages or little pictures, I write the piece and then when I am finished I go on the hunt for artwork or images that follow themes or the tone of the piece I have written. I have no method to this haha, I sort of feel my way through it and see how it comes together. The artwork that I feature in this short story I found weeks after I wrote it late one night while trying to finish up my collage. I was incredibly drawn to Louise Bourgeois’ artwork and the way it looks like blood but also the strange beauty of the paintings. Also, I am fully aware that this woman is basically a legend but her artwork is new to me and I am now very much obsessed.
I love Jenny Bhatt’s Cosmic Womb series, and find it fascinating that she has been drawing this spiral form for twenty years. When I first came across this series I spent about twenty minutes just scrolling through her artwork and always coming back to this painting Bhatt titled Cosmic Womb 5. It spoke to me, and I said out loud to myself, “When I write about the cosmic womb this is exactly how I feel it might look.”
On Sunday night, I found myself in this sort of flow state scrolling through their artwork and placing it in this story where I felt each piece would fit best. When I finally looked up from my laptop it was already 1:10 a.m. and I immediately felt the pain of having to get up in five hours to drive my daughter to school and my son to occupational therapy. I could hardly peele myself away from my screen but made the very responsible adult decision to go to bed.
Now here I am on this Monday afternoon, bribing the baby with carrots and strawberries and the only thing a desperate working mother might revert to— a little cookie. Just so I can finish this piece. This work felt very spiritual, I felt divinely connected to the Cosmic Womb of the Universe and felt the divine feminine energy flowing through me. I hope this story finds you well. And to all my bearers of the womb, he, she they or them, you are magical. You are God.
Until next time dear reader.