Instead of replying to my text about how he got me pregnant, he posts four photos to Twitter, including two selfies and a thirst trap. If he would’ve bothered to respond I would’ve told him I got my period anyway so an abortion isn’t even necessary. I wasn’t going to ask him for money or anything. Even though I spent $350 on pills. It happened while I watched Buffalo ’66 on my laptop and I assumed I was miscarrying, which, if I was, didn’t feel any different than a period. Writhing in pain is something I’m accustomed to doing once a month. I almost like it—the designated time slot for agony.
It is only for an hour or two that I get to panic about pregnancy before the blood starts. Two tests with two lines each. I want to tell no one and everyone at the same time. I tell my friends that I’m supposed to be pregnant with ideas not babies. They think it’s a good joke. I fantasize about the boys I’ve had sex with who I wish were responsible for it instead. Not that I would actually give birth in any of these scenarios. It’s just fun to imagine. Specifically the poet in the terrible hotel room in Bushwick who’s back in Tennessee with his partner. Little poet baby. Dead little poet baby.
My editor emails me that’s she’s meeting up with the guy who broke my heart a few months ago. The guy who said I could write about him and then got upset when I did. It made him feel like a bad person. Like he didn’t realize what he’d done until I put it into words. My editor says she’s going in a group. I hate him but only passively because I don’t feel much of anything anymore thanks to Lexapro. I didn’t feel much when it was all happening. And that felt amazing. To have your heart broken and not really give a fuck. I cried once and that was it. The next month I had my heart broken by a boy I’d only known for a few days. For some reason that totally shattered me. I do still have feelings but only sometimes. Only when it comes to 21-year-old androgynous alcoholic line cook skater boys apparently. Or maybe any boy who will black out with me and run around the city with me laughing and letting me playfully shove him like we’re in a fucking movie.
At Planned Parenthood I have to show my ID to the camera for them to buzz me in. I’m the only girl there without a boyfriend. I take a pregnancy test and it’s negative. I ask if they do ultrasounds but they don’t. I ask if I had a miscarriage and she says she doesn’t know. She says it like it’s normal to not know if you had a miscarriage or just two false positive pregnancy tests. The internet tells me about something called a chemical pregnancy, a miscarriage that happens within the first five weeks. I find it strange that I’ve never heard of it before, and neither have any of my friends, and the people at Planned Parenthood didn’t think to bring it up. After telling everyone I’m newly celibate, I make a date for Saturday with a sound guy at a show and he says I can press the smoke machine button.
I just want to be Christina Ricci in Buffalo ’66—I want a man-baby who looks like Vincent Gallo to let me love him because I have no interior life or backstory, I only possess a simple sense of obedience and beauty that buoy me through life. There’s still hope for me. I’m a week off cigarettes so maybe I can still look young. I could quit drinking and lose twenty pounds again even if I die of boredom. I could buy baby blue eyeshadow (or steal it from CVS). And I can live on a little boat in the ocean of my head and stay there far away from everyone else.
