Fear Itself

When I was thirteen, I had my first near death experience. Maybe that’s a bit overdramatic, but I woke up one morning mid-September to horrible, awful, shooting pains in my abdomen and in my lower back, enough to wake me up at 5:30 in the morning, which was at least an hour before I was used to waking up. I groaned and rolled my face back into the pillow, trying desperately to ignore the ache and throb of my abdominal muscles. It was nearly unbearable. I wanted to cry… or throw up. Maybe I wanted to do both. The longer I laid in bed, the more likely it seemed that I was going to spew empty stomach acid against my lavender shag rug. I blinked, and my eyes stung.

I finally lifted my head from the pillow, still bleary-eyed with sleep, but my stomach was doing flips, and the pain had me flinching. I thought maybe I was just sick. I had never been sick before, and nobody expected me to become ill, since I only had contact with my father. He wasn’t sick, so I sat confused for a moment. I pressed my hands into the sheets to push myself up and out of bed, but I felt moisture instead of dry cotton. Once standing, I lifted my left hand to see traces of something sticky and red that smelled profusely of iron, something sharply metallic. I furrowed my eyebrows and glanced back to the sheets. I tore back the lilac comforter to see my white sheets stained red, and my throat burned. There was pressure working it’s way up, and instinctively, I charged for the bathroom, falling to my knees and retching into the toilet bowl.

I was panicking. I was bleeding profusely, and I felt like somebody had stabbed me in the stomach. What was wrong with me? I flushed the toilet, feeling some relief, but the shooting pain in my tummy wouldn’t subside. I pushed myself back to my feet, aching with every step. The halls were still dark. My father wasn’t due up for quite a bit, so this was an opportune time to take care of the mess before he found out I bled all over everything and grew cross with me for making such a mess. I changed my pajama shorts to a pair of black sweat pants, and I could still feel the wetness in my shorts, but I tossed them among the bloody sheets just before I stripped my bed. I was crying at this point, suddenly distraught over the fact that I had stained my white sheets and my pajama shorts and also that I had thrown up, and all I could worry about was how angry my father was going to be.

Quiet and quick, I balled the sheets up in my arms and rushed for the laundry room, just beside the bathroom, and I knew I had to move fast. The clock was ticking, and my father’s alarm would be beeping any moment; he would wake up for work, he would find me, and he would lecture me about this, and the idea consumed me as I shoved the mess into the washing machine, loading it up with bleach instead of detergent. I turned it on, and the machine began to rumble and spin, and the soapy water took on a copper tint, or maybe I was just imagining things.

As I turned to leave, I noticed that my hands and forearms were now spotted and spattered with the blood on my sheets, and I tried to muffle the on-coming sobs by biting my bottom lip. I scurried back to the bathroom as quickly as I could, rushing to the sink. I turned the faucet on, not even sure what temperature I had set it to; I didn’t care. I just had to get the blood off, but as I started to scrub soap up and down my arms, I glanced up to catch my father’s reflection in the tilted mirror of the medicine cabinet, and I just couldn’t hold my sobs in any longer. “I was trying to be quiet,” I cried.

“I know,” my father told me quietly, wiping his eyes. “But there’s a trail of red spots leading from your room to the laundry room… and then in here.” He paused, and he just offered me a soft smile, which quelled the tears flooding from my eyes. “I think it’s time we’ve had a talk.”

We stayed in the bathroom for that one, as I expressed the fact that moving made me want to throw up again. I can’t go into detail on most of what was discussed because it’s a conversation I really wished I didn’t have to have with my father; pretty sure I blocked a lot of it out subconsciously. There were things I remembered him saying, though, just a few specifics. He mentioned that I was growing up, that it was all natural, and when I looked at him with discomfort, he just laughed, “I’m your dad. I still love you. It’s really not that big of a deal, Tali.”

Later that evening, I took haven back in my books, collecting a pile on the floor to try and distract myself as I waited for the aspirin to kick in and relax the muscles in my abdomen. I had many books at this point: literature, collections of short stories, and even text books. I had books on computer science & technology (I did have quite an interest in that), astronomy, political science, among other things. The two books on top were anatomy and life science books, things that I hoped would explain to me a little more about this, but it all just kept coming down to reproduction, and I was hit with the stark realization that I was expelling the blood from a uterus that would never have a child, at least not so long as I remained where I was.

Suddenly filled with rage and frustration, I ripped the page straight of the book before slamming it shut and hurling it across the room. It skid across the floor and just sat there. I turned away and looked up toward the curtains hanging in front of my window. I shook my head and sat there, staring, watching, hoping maybe something would change, but it didn’t. Nothing changed. Nothing ever changed.