20. How far can you carry this?
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? there is blood on your hands, inking his name into your skin, like ownership, like possession. there is a weight on your spine like the whole of the galaxy, like you are atlas come again, atlas come undone. something is cracking inside of you. there is a fissure, somewhere in your body, in the vessel you have become, full to bursting with love and hope and liberty and ideals. ( what was your name, before the war ? it’s fading. ) the fissure spreads, like spiderwebs, like veins, like the blood staining your fingertips, your palm. how long has it been there ? has it always spread this far ? to your wrists, to your elbows ? your hands press against your stomach, swollen and hard beneath your hands, and something inside, something that is both your child and not your child, that something MOVES inside of you. it feels like ecstasy, and like suffering, and perhaps, you realize, the difference between the two has not been profound for years.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? there is a sickness in you, a disease ––– surely, there must be something wrong with you, because your nightmares come more frequently now, the blood staining your pale skin ( were you always this pale ? when did you last see the sun ? when did you last touch something green ? ) from fingertip to elbow, dripping from your fingertips. you do not dare ask the void who the blood belongs to. the void answers anyway. some nights it shows you a thirteen year old battlefield, littered with mechanical bodies and gungans and plasma spread across dying fields. some nights it shows you your parents’ house, overgrown with weeds and vines, with a broken bowl of fruit rotting at the center of the kitchen table. some nights it shows you your husband’s people, your friends, your companions, the peacekeepers, discarded and tossed on a stone floor like abandoned rags. the children are the hardest to look at, but the void will not allow you to look away. some nights, though, and these are the worst nights, it shows you nothing, and you look down at your body and your stomach is gone, clawed open by your own nails, and whatever was inside is spilling out of you in the form of LIGHT.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? you wake up screaming and gasping for air more often than not, an invisible hand wrapped around your throat and a roaring in your ears. it doesn’t matter; he’s never home to hear it anyway. you can count on one hand the amount of times you’ve shared a bed in the last lunar year, and sometimes it’s a wonder and a miracle that your stomach is even growing at all. ( reunions are brief, but passion has never been lacking between the two of you. perhaps it’s not such a wonder after all. ) you tumble from your bed and you retch and heave into your sink until your stomach spasms and your throat burns and you can’t tell if it’s the bile or the nightmares. you hear things too keenly all day; you are pale and sick and cannot keep anything down, and the fissure in your ribcage is CRACKING, CRACKING, CRACKING. a handmaid asks you if you’re alright, and the sound makes you wince. her concern is rolling off of her like a symphony, like an icy blue aura in shades of neon. you can feel a migraine coming on. the baby kicks.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? you call your mother, for advice. you ask leading questions, abstract questions, questions about your sister, about yourself, about the early days of your parents’ marriage, and the town you grew up in, the town your father built with his own two hands. you were young when your sister gave birth to her first child; you do not remember if it was as difficult as this is for you, and you do not want to ask her, because she is your sister, and she is as dear to you as your own heart, attached to you somewhere in the right side of your ribcage, but she is nosy. if you ask her a question. she will have a HUNDRED of her own. your mother is little help. her own pregnancies were easy, though she craved sweets with you so much that she thought you would slide out from between her legs on a honeyed trail. she laughs, but yours is little more than an echo. she asks after your health, and you lie, and you wait for the guilt, but it does not hit you. ( you suppose you have spent so much of your life lying to your mother that it comes more naturally to you than the truth, and that, that thought hurts, like a sharp blade into the skin above the curve of your stomach. ) come home, she urges. come home.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? he has never been gone this long before, has never been this far from your reach, at least, not in so many words. he is always far from your reach these days, has been slipping farther and farther from you for months and years, and you have been left there, watching it happen, watching the house you built on rubble and dirt begin to crumble and fall apart. you have no one to blame but yourself. you knew the base wasn’t stable when you began. still, you fret, you worry, and you know in the back of your mind that this isn’t good for the baby, but neither are the nightmares, neither is the vomiting, the retching, the weight melting from your arms and your legs. you know enough about pregnancy to know most women gain weight; they don’t lose it. the void has begun to show you your own death, bleeding light and a black, viscous liquid on an operating table. the void does not show you your child. you begin to understand why your husband harbors so much resentment for the ways of his people, for the lack of clear answers. if you could beat down the wall, if you could tear at it with your nails and demand answers, if you could rend the shadow from your own body and shake it until it tells you WHY, WHY, WHY, WHY, you would. ( you have loved him for years, and it takes his child in your womb and his religion in your brain to make you finally begin to understand him. the thought leaves you feeling like the world HOLLOW. ) you think, sometimes, you could endure this better if he were here to hold your hair back in the mornings and hold your body at night. it is a heavy burden, but you can hold it and still stand upright, for now, but –––– you wish you did not have to do so alone.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? lonely, lonely, lonely, you are so achingly alone that it feels as though something inside of you is eating you from the inside out. like one day you’ll look into the mirror and you’ll be gone, just some echo of a scream that you let out in the middle of a nightmare. ( riddle me this: if a senator screams in her apartment and there’s no one around to hear her, does she make a sound ? ) every day you think: today. today is the day. today is the day he’ll return. and every night you go to bed, once again, heartrendingly alone. you begin to wonder, delirious and abandoned, if he ever existed at all, or if you dreamt up your whole lives together. there are stories, endless stories, of abandoned women, waiting for their husbands to return home, heroic. you suppose you ought to feel like a princess, locked in a tower, braiding her hair and sewing flowers into clothing, waiting for your hero to slay the dragon and rescue you. you wonder what the princesses did when their hero was both the tower and the dragon. ( YOU DON’T GET A SAY IN THIS. ) a shudder runs down your spine, and you barely make it to the sink before your lunch is expelled from your throat. your handmaiden thinks you should see a meddroid, but you dismiss her for the day, and she does not argue with you. there is blood on your hands again. perhaps you are not the princess. perhaps you are the oracle.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? he returns on the wings of victory, and you should be joyful, and you are, but the joy of this thing inside of you has long since worn away. it is no longer a novelty, this child. it is now a concern, a what are we going to do ? he does not have the answers, and, bitterly, you wonder why you ever thought he would. the thought is gone in an instant, and you tell yourself it’s unfair to think such things of the man you love. ( it is unfair of him to leave you alone so often, but you knew what you were getting into when you signed up for this. you think. the details get fuzzier and blurrier every day. ) he is home, he is happy, this is all you wanted, this is all you asked for. you take him into your bed, you lie beneath him and grasp at the sheets and you wonder at the line between ecstasy and terror and the line between greed and selflessness and you feel HOLY FIRE spread through your veins like the light you keep dreaming is going to bleed from your every pore. you sleep beside him, and the void does not visit you. instead, it infects his bloodstream, it leaves him shaken and cold to your touch, and you comfort him, but resentment, bitter and acrid, begins to worm its way into your heart. you have endured this for months without complaint, and one nightmare sends him into a full blown panic. and now it is not your burden to bear alone, but he is not helping you carry it; he has taken it from your back and placed it upon his own spine, and it should feel good, you should feel better, but instead it just leaves you hollow and angry. ( you suppose it is in men’s nature to take. )
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? the blood returns within the week, staining your hands and your wrists and your forearms, until it’s creeping up your arms even in waking, spreading and spilling across your throat like someone has slit it open from ear to ear. you can’t help but feel like the void is trying to warn you of something. it hangs over your head like a swollen cloud of dread, and you scrub your hands with an obsession, but you never feel clean. your husband sleeps beside you every other night, but you cannot help but feel as though he is MILES AND MILES away from you. you wonder which is worse: to be truly alone, or to lie next to someone, to be beside them, and still be alone. the fissure inside of you is beginning to spilt apart, and you are running out of ways to keep the light inside of you. you tell yourself things will be different when the baby comes, when you step down, when the war ends. but these things are both too far away and far too close to merit real change, and so all you can do is wait, and watch your husband panic.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? the blood becomes real three days before you give birth. your name is inked into every body your husband left in the trailing wake of his own fear. when you vomit, the void whispers an apology. i tried, the shadows tell you. i tried to warn you.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? as far as i have to.
HOW FAR CAN YOU CARRY THIS ? not very far at all.
