I'm broken again. What meagre supports that had been holding up the sky, as bolstered as they were by dreams and laughter and accomplishments and the warmth of years and months and weeks and days, are still there, behind a sheen of tears that I've been fighting back since eight o'clock this morning.
Last night I cooked the Best Spaghetti Sauce ever. Fresh tomatoes, peeled and diced, a pound and a half of freshly ground beef, two huge red onions, portabello mushrooms and yellow peppers and romano, parmesan, mozzarella and some other italian cheese grated and mixed right in. Tabasco sauce, salt, white pepper, bay leaves and freshly chopped oregano... White noodles and whole wheat ones from my glass jars, with a little pat of butter stirred in. Fresh kalamata olive oil to cook the meat and onions together.
It was a truly glorious spaghetti, and enough to feed four people at work today, and enough to give a proud taste to several more.
I done good, with my spaghetti. It was a faithful spaghetti, spawned from aimless wandering about the aisles of the grocery store with a basket in hand and a creative urge. It was random and it was beautiful.
I thought maybe that the tears in my eyes were from the slight sting of onion still wafting about my nostrils -- my booger was rife with the scent, and ten hectic hours of fiddling with DSA structures didn't let me think about it much.
The good news is that I don't have ovarian cancer. I still have cysts that started growing when I got pregnant by my imaginary husband and lost it not long after to antibiotics and a choice I would have probably made if I'd had it.
The good news is that my new gynecologist is not a butcher like the last one that kept me going to CLSCs for STD tests, and kept me as far away from examinating rooms as I could manage.
The bad news is that no matter how professional, how kindly, how gentle the good doctor was, no matter how he surprised me by switching to a smaller duckbill because he saw how much it hurt me to have the regular one used, no matter how swiftly he noticed my crooked cervix and my ultra-small uterus...
It hurt. I can still feel the foreignness inside me, the metal, the gloved hand, I can feel the poking and the prodding and the spikes of pain when he found the tender spots.
And I feel invaded. Broken. I am loathing my body, loathing being a woman, all the confidence of the past year and the growing appreciation for feminity is dispersed from the moment I lay down and spread myself open on demand.
It's just an examination. By an old man, with no interest in anything but my health and fertility. It was swift, fifteen minutes on the table from cultures to final prodding, it was clean and professional and the pain was more shock than agony.
He spent another ten minutes answering my questions in his office, all patience and understanding and clinical courtesy.
And I know that it's just like the dentist, it's just another part of modern living, it's nothing, just skin and fleshy and gooey bits, and I won't need it for another year if all my pap/blood tests come out clean, which upon preliminary examination they are more than likely to.
Still I feel invaded. Still I feel the shadow of a latex glove, vastly different from a condom only in theory, and when David stopped by to ask me if I wanted company tonight my eyes welled up and I couldn't even tell him no out loud.
I shook my head, and began apologizing, unsure if I was apologizing for turning down sex for the first time EVER, no matter how many times a night, or if I was apologizing because I wasn't sure if I could do it again.
Apologizing because right then, as I was deciding to forget segmentation faults for just one evening, it all came rushing at me and I couldn't live with myself. I couldn't live inside myself, with my fat legs and small breasts and beady eyes and the gaping hole in the center of all of it.
"You know we don't have to have sex, I could just stop by for the company... Or do you really need to be alone?"
I don't know... Call me, I guess, we'll see, uhm...
It was a truly fine spaghetti sauce, reminiscent of the cooking lesson an italian exchange student had given me one evening after class in France, it was bright and fresh and smelled of utopian gardens in summer dusk.
It gave me the urge to try a ros� sauce next, with finely sliced prosciutto and maybe even handmade tortellini.
Right now, though, I am taking my third bath this week, on my knees pleading for serenity, I am going to close my eyes and reach out for one of the Old Paths and I am going to tell the stress of the past week and the ones to come precisely where they stand.
And I am going to try to feel less broken. I am going to have a drink and refuse to think or vacuum or clean, and I am going to promise myself that it isn't going to be all work and sleep and work and sleep and stress and fear and sleep from here on.
Just tonight. Oh please let it just be for tonight.
I can see the hairline tears in the surprisngly fragile membrane of my spirit, and I'm praying to a deity that I invented long ago that these are the kind that heal.
Just flesh. Just flesh.
Inside me.