3 minutes

 I remember the sharp tinge of a cigarette infiltrating my nostrils; flooding my mind with a numbness that releases floods of ecstasy and relief into my blood. Maybe it’s not the same as the morphine that will seep into my body if I go through with this. Maybe it’s not the same as the rush and the harrowing feel of my heart beat drumming in my ears, in my mouth, in my stomach, in my chest when I inject myself with a syringe; slowly watching the heroin disappear into my veins. Maybe it’s not the same.

 Maybe I don’t want it to be.

 I remember my hand flicking off the ash; I remember watching it slowly descend and settle on the floor – content and fine, with nowhere else to go.

 I remember as the edge of the toilet seat digs into my skin; a dull ache that I just can’t shake. That I just can’t let go. My hand is firm around the plastic stick, my fingers skimming its edges as I wait.

 As I wait and I wait and I wait.

 The stick still faintly smells of my urine and it’s cold and it’s hard and it’s formidable. Its screen is blank and stares back at me with my own reflection; fathomless and searching. My brain catapults me into a vicious and vindictive whirlpool of jagged thoughts that scar me with their bluntness and chances of possibility.

 I tuck a fold of my hair behind my ear and start tapping my foot on the floor as I will the 3 minutes to go just a little bit faster.

 My eyes escape and jump over the tiles of the bathroom floor until they land on the mirror. Dust punctuates its surface, staining my reflection until I become barely visible. My vision scavenges my face for a sign of hope, a flash of want, a glimmer of expectation but returns and recedes back with burnt out embers that disintegrate into a fine layer that is as black as my volcanic fear.

 I remember this fear tying a noose around my throat, tightening and tightening as I wish for the time to run quicker but pray for this moment to slow and stop and vanish into eternity.

 I remember my mind ticking off the seconds until there are no more numbers left to count.

 I remember knowing that this particular fraction of a second will change everything; overturn everything until the decision I make today will leave me stranded on the ground with my soul trying to itch away from me in the hopes of escaping this vengeful hell or watching me soar into the sky, glitter and gold everywhere.

 I remember my ears popping, eyes tearing up, breaths heaving and my heart beat speeding up.

 My closed eyes inch their way down to my shaking hands. I blink to clear my vision from the sparkle of tears as they run down my cheek. I close my grip into fists and open my lids.

 I remember the feeling of being suspended in the air; the feeling when everything slows down like a withheld breath; the feeling of nothingness as I evaluate the meaning of the two parallel lines on the pregnancy test that mirror the beating of another’s heart in my stomach.

 The memory has me in chains.

 I try to break free and it’s like unraveling myself; bludgeoning my soul to get rid of a part of me I don’t want. I tear away at the ropes that tether me to these images that punctuate my mind like a camera coming in and out of focus.

 I fight to gain control, to win liberation, to find solace but I am pulled again and again to the ground that breaks me off my hinges every time I find myself breathing in the same stench of a cigarette.

 Every time my wandering eyes land on the fabric that covers my stomach.

 Every time I look at the clock and am reminded of those 3 minutes that shattered my world into something unrecognizable.

 Forcing myself out of my reverie, I find myself still sitting on the hard and rough plastic seat in the waiting room.

 Tracing my finger around the smooth edges of the Christian Cross that hangs limply around my neck, I quickly adjust myself as I crane my neck to look at the clock on the wall across the waiting area.

 09:03.

 It has been about forty minutes since I walked in through the metal doors to check in with my appointment at the clinic. The smell of detergent, sweaty human bodies and terrible decisions still hangs in the air like a promise meant to be broken. The floor beneath my tapping feet is marble; the cheap kind. It has edges chipped off and a pattern of cracks beginning and ending in the same exact place. A poster about the importance of different kinds of contraception is pasted on the wall in front of me; decorated by a carefully crafted pattern from cigarette butts and ignorant stares. It’s fluttering away as if to hint at the sorry fact that its existence isn’t going to put a dent in the expressions of all the women who’ll keep arriving here every day.

 A receptionist at the front desk is chatting away on a phone call, jotting down some notes. I can tell from where I am sitting that she definitely wouldn’t be here if this job wasn’t producing a stealthy pay check. A lamp beside me flickers, catching my attention. I vaguely register that the bulb is probably dying; shedding its light on some magazines that date back to the early 2010s. I pick one up, its pages are stained with the fingers of a thousand pregnant women before me who wanted a distraction to divert their mind away from the muffled realization that longs to be heard but is slowly fading away.

 I leaf through the pages, absorbing nothing as the words jumble up before me, the letters lose their meaning and the pictures don’t make any sense. A paper falls from between the binds and lands on my feet. I bend down and pick it up.

 It is a leaflet walking a person through the all the steps and the trials and tribulations of adoption. My breath hitches, my gaze clouds over and I hastily stuff the leaflet back into the magazine and return it back to the table.

 I lean back and rest my head against the back of the chair, my eyes closed. I try to calm my breaths and will air into my lungs. It’s as if the unspoken gravity of all our doings, the unshed tears and the finality which hangs in the atmosphere like a life teetering on the edge of balance is forced into my body, clogging my throat and rusting my lungs.

 I open my eyes and toy with the crucifix around my neck that seems to be burning a hole inside my chest. Uncomfortable, sweaty and impatient, I start scratching away at the skin of my forearms. My fingernails dig into the layers that start tearing away with every scratch. I scrape through with my nails until scarlet marks start to appear. And with them comes the raging pain. I continue lacerating until my fingers slip and I can feel my heart beat pounding through the gashes. The agony resurfaces and I welcome it. I welcome it and I want it and I like it. This pain gives a physical reason for the wounds that are like a dawning hole inside me; consuming me into it until I can’t see a single spec of light.

 I can concentrate on this pain better. I can understand this pain better. I can register this pain better.

 I stop. I stop after realizing that people are starting to watch. I stare at my arm and at the damage I have wrecked, emotionless, until my gaze intakes the cluster of multiple black wounds that paint the skin of my elbow. The circular spots that survive the memory of hundreds of injections scraping away and forsaking my body, flooding me with heroin and with an addiction that takes another form of life itself until it manifests into its own being; ruthless, parasitical and cruel.

 A sharp pang goes through me and I look up.

 I look up and I forget and I wipe my memory clean because that’s what I do best.

 I feel the blood in my veins turning to lead and I feel the suffocation hording my mind as my chest folds into itself and it’s like a stake puncturing my heart until I can almost taste blood at the back of my throat. Hyperventilating, I scoot over to the end of my seat, scoop down and wrench up my bag from the floor; its withering leather leaving traces on the marble. My shaking hands try and fail at several attempts to yank open the zip that when I succeed, I almost whimper in relief.

 Sifting through moldy electricity bills, overdue tax forms and an eviction notice, I locate my stash stuffed somewhere beneath crumpled dollars and lose change. Hands slipping over the plastic sheath, I tear it open and tap some of the white powder in a straight line down the palm of my trembling hand. With my lose one, I dive back into the bag and my fingers fumble over a 10 dollar bill. I take it out, hastily roll it and bring the end closer to the cocaine.

 Heart racing, breaths quivering, sanity collapsing, I lower my head and behind the feeble curtain of my bag, snort the cocaine straight out of my hand. I lean my head back, scrunching up my nose as I feel the adrenaline coursing through my body, breaking levees and evaporating lucidity.

 It’s almost like a golden light is all around me and I feel like I am flying higher and higher and higher into a haven where all senses dissolve into one another creating hymns and chords that reach their crescendo everywhere.

 It’s angelic. It’s heavenly. It’s safe.

 I can almost feel power electrifying my bones, I can almost hear the unrelenting cackling of the demons recede and the singing and the falsetto surround me; enveloping me into its warmth.

 I think I can feel God, no, I think I can experience God. I think I can touch Him. Feel Him. See Him.

 It’s almost like He is right there, he’s right there and I am right here.

 And then it dawns. The ecstasy recedes and my mind pushes back, my brain falls right into place. My pupils dilate, eyes roll back in my head, ears pop, a burn ignites on my skin just below my neck and a sigh escapes my mouth and suddenly I am cradling the Holy Bible. 

  I look up and around at the peach curtains that allow hints of moonlight through the patio windows that paint shadows on the carpeted floor. I vaguely realize that I am at my parents’ home.

 The overhead lamp casts an eerie shadow on the cover. The meager glow wouldn’t be enough for reading if not for the flames that lick each other in the fireplace. The mantel above is covered with stacked mail and car keys. My gaze travels over the picture frames that are hung just above the red bricks of the hearthstone. A slight protective blanket of dust covers the pictures but they are alight enough from the raging flames that I can decipher the braces and the freckles and the ponytail that dominate the features of a girl who looks just like me.

 The camera flash glints in the eyes of my father whose ringed hand rests on my shoulder and he looks happy. He looks content. My eyes shift towards another framed photograph in which my hands hold up a high school diploma. I am wearing a graduation cap and a gown which is as blue as my eyes. I stare intently into my face and I think I look proud, I think I look like I am about to burst out laughing at someone else’s joke and I can barely hold the giggle in. My mother is standing beside me and her face is turned towards me, her eyes seem to radiate warmth and she is looking at me as if nothing in the world matters more. She is looking at me as if her entire universe revolves around me; as if I am the axis. She is looking at me as if she cares.

 I turn my head back to the closed book lying in my lap. The softness of the armchair assaults my body because it’s so unfamiliar and so foreign. I trace a finger down the spine of the Bible, the leather smooths over as it responds to my lingering touch.

 I turn over the cover to find a bound Jesus Christ on a cross drawn across the page and almost dreamily identify the syllables of my name etched on the top of the smooth laminated paper. I sift through the soft pages that seem to dissolve at my touch and my eyes scan the random words carefully scribbled vertically on the side of every page.

 I stop sifting as I reach a bookmark tucked between the lines as if somebody wanted to mark something for future remembrance.

 Holding my breath, I notice dried ink circling some verses as if to embolden the letters that translate God’s words into writing.

 ‘For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.’ 

 Words fail to pass the confrontation on my lips and disappear on the sandpaper of my tongue as my throat closes in and I can not gulp. Almost unconsciously, my hand flies to my stomach and beneath the cotton of my white dress, beneath the flawed and pale skin, beneath the screams of my caged soul; I feel a heartbeat.

 A faint, hesitant, mistaken heart beat.

 And then follows a silence so deafening, so ear splitting, so loud that my ears bleed and my life flashes before my eyes. Suddenly, I am in a vortex, floating away into an abyss hotter and deadlier than the life I have chosen to lead. A hellish scalding pain aces through my body and suddenly I am surrounded by the resonating echoes of my name.

 I try to climb towards that voice, to unleash myself from this unrelenting brutal definition of life and birth that transcends into every single second I have spent shattering my being into a glittering carpet of shards. Every minute is represented by a blinding flash in a spectrum that robs me of any rational thought. I try and I try and I try to revive myself again and again and then I hear the sound of my name echoing everywhere.

 My eyes discover a flickering candle and I push towards it, I pull myself towards it until this demonic imagery of my past and my present leaves me behind and I feel a cool rush of air like a waking breath.

 ‘Eva?’

 I wake at the sound of my name on the intercom at the abortion clinic.

 I sit upright. My hands are sweaty so I wipe them off on my faded jeans. My breaths are quick, short and not enough. I lean my elbows on my knees and cover my quivering face with my hands. I gasp into my skin; the air scalding my palms with their heat. Rubbing my eyes until a thin streak of a tear slowly runs off my arms, I push back the lose tendrils of my ear and get up.

 ‘Eva?’

 The robotic voice of the receptionist on the intercom bellows all around me once again. I brush the spilled silvery dust of the drug from my shirt and mourn the loss of a good stash inwardly. I weave my way through the aisles of plastic chairs in the waiting area and lock eyes with every blank stare that smolder blemishes of judgment, accusation and disapproval on to my face.

 The sound of my steps sound awfully loud in the hall where the only other noises are of the television overheard droning away and the silent whimpers of a fifteen year old girl waiting for her appointment. Reaching the end of the waiting area, I pass by the receptionist who points me to my room without passing me a second glance. And then I place my hand on the green door of the operating room.

 I slightly push open the door to peak through the crack and witness a nurse strapping on green gloves and a doctor placing a sharp instrument face down on a tray.

 A sudden flash of hot agony burns the skin below my neck; I look down and finger the cross that rests crookedly at my throat. I stop.

 I stop and I hesitate. I glance back at the waiting area and at the set of double doors that would lead me out into a starry, cloudless night. A shudder runs through my body and my heart skips a beat. I feel God again but this time in all His fiery, destructive and incandescent glory.

 I clench and then unclench my fist, blink once, twice, thrice. Everything pauses like the wind itself is holding its breath and then I face forward, wipe my memory clean and walk right in through the doors of the operation theater to kill my baby.