Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
She looked at me like she knew me already. She didn’t ask questions but she told me her stories openly and freely. We sat in her clean, sparsely-decorated, empty home. On the mantelpiece sat five shells. One shell for each of her miscarriages. Each was vastly different, as each loss had been. There was a jagged white one – the first, she told me – a small blue one, another white shell, a red-tinged one and a purple one. I imagined her walking along the beach, tears in her eyes, and a hole deep inside as she collected rocks and shells, feeling them between her fingers over and over before pocketing the right one. Five sad trophies side by side in a lonely house. “I couldn’t do it to him anymore,” she said of her absent husband “I couldn’t do it to myself anymore.”
I sat in silence on the other side of the room. My story was different to hers, and one I could not tell her; one she could not hear. I did not pick out a shell, or any other rare treasure from the sea after my abortion. I didn’t see the foetus as a baby, as a life. Pregnancy was a condition I was desperate to be cured of. I needed distance between me and him and I aborted the thing we made that would have glued us together for the rest of our lives. It was not sad, and there was no remorse. It was clean. It was clinical. I signed some paperwork and changed into a paper gown and put my legs in stirrups. And when I woke up they fed me miniature sandwiches and apple juice. A friend drove me home where I slept some more and in the morning I packed one suitcase and took the train to the airport. I couldn’t handle looking into his eyes one final time, nor being held hostage by his mood swings and inexplicable rage. On the bench at home, if he looked, he would find my note: “You already know why.” If he didn’t see it coming then he’d never understand the leaving; he didn’t deserve the explanation he couldn’t understand.
“Do you think you’ll have children one day?” She asked me hopefully, a sad smile on her face. I looked at her collection of shells before I met her eyes “I’m not sure.” I shrugged gently.