Take Me Apart

I think I believed him just because he said I was different. Men do that. They separate us from the pack. And we are grateful, because the pack is a dangerous place to be.

I didn’t know fear before. I didn’t know how it could shape you. Make you do things you didn’t want to do. I didn’t know how it lives in you like dye, like a stain that will never come out. How it works its way through you until your blood is made of it, until it is fear that pushes oxygen through your veins, fear that pumps your heart, open and shut, open and shut. The fear has no subject. It has no ground. It has only me, and some days it eats me alive.

Men are always better at being crazy. Better at being forgiven. The blood on their hands can be real, not imagined. They can be bought and sold and still no one thinks they are owned.

How do you talk to other people, afterward? After the worst, I mean. After your brain swells you up and spits you out, a saliva lump of a human being. How do you communicate with people who spent that entire time in charge of their own mind?

As if the alcohol could slow everyone’s hearts, clean out all their wounds. As if Sabrina, or Kate, or any woman, just needed the world to be a little blurrier, and that would put their pain at the right level, a level that was tolerable and small.

But this child is mostly mine. We forged each other in a way Jake can never understand. Even if he had been here. He can never know how, over the past nine months, my body became a thing I shared. It became our body. And then, after nine hours of labor, our body split in two. Flesh from flesh. The child and me.

She was petite—she had a metabolism that could process pig lard into sinewy muscle—with a head of tight, tiny curls that always looked just a little wet.

When Kate had been waiting out her winter, everyone told her to get over it, work through it, talk it out. As if prepositions could protect her. As if others knew whatever lay beyond was better. In reality, all anyone knew was that it came next.