LENA ZIEGLER

Those Who Splinter

My writing playlist evokes unoriginal boredom. Suburban dissatisfaction, like “Little Boxes,” was never reduced to the theme song for Weeds, and cynicism can be worn as butterfly clips and berry-toned lipstick. Has anything ever been more Nineties? Inside, I’m a grunge teenager. These are my flannel thoughts and the baggy-jeaned broken promises to myself: I will not end up like them, and yet—

There’s the suburban dream you’ve been told to dread, but you want it. You want it.

I see a baby in the arms of a woman at Panera Bread and its baby cheeks are so perfectly babyish, as if birthed from the depths of a 3D printer: This here is your baby prototype, and I resent her the way a middle school dance tastes on unkissed lips, the way a bra doesn’t stuff itself, the way marks can’t unstretch on broken teenage skin, the way virginity turns to dust in your palm like the ground up corpse of a butterfly that turned out to be a moth. I resent her the way divorce was not an option but became the only option. I resent her the way I once resented love that didn’t hurt, the far away dream it was, accessible to everyone but me.

I see a baby in the arms of a woman at Panera Bread, and I want it. I want it.

This is my body, and it grows and grows from the inside out. Miles of tissue, like unstrung DNA. Is this destiny or poor genetics? My womb flipped inside out, like a wooly sock, stringy tendrils of tissue, like threads, emanating outward. Inside of me is the Upside Down, eight teenagers and all, destined to self-destruct, under the black-lace weight of something that looks like one thing, and turns out to be something entirely different.

Across the table, my husband sits, wombless, yet happy, and I wonder what it must be like to feel no need whatsoever to hold space for someone else inside of your own body. I was born with a vacuum, a loading zone for human life, just waiting for a full truckload of baby parts to appear one tiny being at a time. He doesn’t know this desire, like he doesn’t know how it feels to own a clitoris, or dress for his body shape. But together, we sometimes fantasize of a world in which he can carry me in his shirt pocket all day long, while I nuzzle against his chest, warm in this safe spot where a little lady can be a lady, safely, in a world unfit for either. Is this his version of womb envy, or is it simply love?

Inside of Panera Bread, I Google if kangaroos can have endometriosis, or if their basic function of carrying pouched babies is a marsupial right taken for granted by everyone except those mammals whose pouches sometimes come with holes.

I could have spent another two hours in there.

Lovers and surgeons will dissect you until there’s nothing left. But my doctor speaks of oxygen levels, how mine dropped so dangerously low they had to stop the surgery, originally intended as a cystectomy, but which evolved into a diagnosis and multi-hour excavation of endometrial overgrowth. I imagine the anesthesiologist, an old farmer with straw in his mouth, this bitch ain’t breathing, none, and I want to laugh. Except the anesthesiologists were two women, too beautiful and too kind to ever chew straw, and it’s not all that funny when I think about it, anyway. I will require at least one more surgery.

How much is left in there?

In there. That temporal space. That wretched empty void. I’m not sure anyone asked or if anyone can tell me, but I want to know. How much is left? Am I drowning in it? Am I slowly being strangled to death, unknowingly suffocated by the excess, so that one day I’ll just drop dead from all the lesions creepy crawling through me like termites?

In bed, later, I Google the stages of endometriosis and try to predict which one is mine. Since eleven years old, there was pain so extraordinary—so insufferable and all-consuming—my very girlhood collapsed around me. This, I was told, was normal. But now, with this newborn diagnosis, I picture the overgrowth inside of me, Spanish moss hanging, dripping, flowery disappointment vining through me. I always knew, but I never knew. Every month, year after year, my body swollen, the pain radiating through every inch, every space where the tissue spread, unwanted and relentless.

On YouTube, I listen to the voiceover of a surgeon whose Stage Three endometriosis patient, five years younger than me, who desperately wants children, “only,” had to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed, while her uterus remained intact, ready to be inseminated with the miracle of science.

Seven years earlier, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, I danced on the shoreline, the salt-spray of my mid-twenties foaming all around me. This was my body holding space only for me, as I watched the sun dissolve into melted pools of itself, reflecting its own beautiful shadow along the water. At home there was a man, fuming, my phone dead too many hours for his comfort. Out of touch for too many hours. Alone with myself too long for him to feel safe. People all over, all around me, crawling, infecting the earth, but it was only me and the water and the absent sun taking up space. There’s nothing more beautiful and alive than the edge of the universe, unfettered.

It took two full days to scrub the last remaining bits of beach tar from my feet after dancing on the shoreline and walking the boardwalk of the Santa Monica Pier. On the plane home, it finally peeled away completely, a forgotten souvenir of temporary freedom. There was a man at home; his body and my body did not match. His shirt pocket would only suffocate.

It’s sticky, the YouTube surgeon says over video footage of a robotic tool cauterizing the tissue from some womb-adjacent organs. It can cause so much damage. It can be so hard to remove.

In bed, I Google the success rate of in vitro fertilization. The very first response says fifty percent and I feel no need to go further. I decide the internet serves no purpose outside of falling in love and crushing hope.

Is fifty/fifty supposed to be good odds?

Would you bet a life on it?

In the weeks after my surgery, I don’t care about anything. I eat meat for the first time in eight years because it’s all just flesh. Nothing matters, anyway, when you’re a mangled mess of blood cells and seventy-five percent water, incapable of birthing anything but your own contempt. I’m too embarrassed to cry. Too ashamed to unburden myself to anyone outside of my weekly therapy appointment. I say it must sound ridiculous to feel this way before breaking into uncontrollable sobs. My therapist smiles sadly.

Not all hope is lost, though I know it feels that way.

Is it destiny or poor genetics? In one reality, I am the blood of my ancestry, generation after generation of silent female suffering, woman after woman bearing the furry infestation of weeds spread so thick and far, no sperm could carve its way to the promised land of the aching womb buried behind it. In the other, I am unworthy of motherhood, as every woman in my family conceives, and conceives, and conceives, and those who don’t splinter, forgotten, from the family tree. To call it destiny might feel worse, but is there any difference?

[Any amount of years] earlier, there was a man at home, and love was a pathetic, misplaced thing teetering on the edge of some other far-away shoreline. Back then, love was my only longing and life was a problem to be solved by finding it. But where there was love, there were men, and where there were men, there was violence, waiting deceptively in the shadows, dressed as kindness.

In bed, I read how endometriosis can grow through your body, woven like lace through the intestines, reaching up into your stomach, fogging the lungs, then penetrating the brain and sprouting buds of new, chaotic beginnings. Some of this tissue has been here since your earliest periods, my surgeon tells my husband, who tells me, as I sob tearfully post-op. Streaks of deep red stain the fabric on the hospital bed where I’ve been left to bleed. My husband helps me stand, then sit in the wheelchair they’ve brought for me. My hospital gown hangs loosely from my body, threatening to reveal the smudges of blood and orange disinfectant on my stomach and my thighs. Four laparoscopic incisions to attack my cyst; four-to-six weeks of prescribed celibacy to heal the internal wounds left behind from being scraped out, but not yet clean.

He tries to talk to me, but I only cry, so he quiets himself too, kneeling on the floor in front of me, lifting each foot one at a time, and gently placing them through the leg holes in my underwear. He lifts me to my feet, sliding the underwear over my knees and past my thighs to rest on my hips. He repeats the process with my leggings, careful as he pulls them over my incisions, bloodied and raw under surgical glue. My mind is clear. Whatever fog typically exists post-surgery, I don’t have it. I know I am loved. Still, I can only cry. I need another surgery.

Across the table, my husband sits with earbuds, listening to probably some kind of techno, or maybe “Party in the USA,” over, and over, and over again. I listen to my cynical Nineties playlist. Panera Bread is filled with smells and the sounds of happy people who eat healthy at least sometimes. People with human dignity still intact. Should I be pitching this as marketing copy? Perhaps. I imagine a Panera Bread executive sitting across the table from me in a freshly pressed gray suit, audibly judging my apparent lack of self-respect as I guzzle mac and cheese like a pig at a trough. Who does that during an interview? No future Panera Bread Marketing Associate, you better believe, she mutters under her breath, scribbling notes in a pad like a TV psychiatrist.

As a teenager, I dreamed of being hollowed out and made clean. The E! channel was a mainstay on the thirteen-inch television in my high school bedroom, and if memory serves me, which it may not, lots of celebrity diets in the early two thousands included routine colon cleanses. Twelve to twenty pound losses, overnight, as leftover fecal matter of an entire human lifetime would get scraped from the bowels like lead paint from an old house.

How much shit gets left behind to be dealt with later, when we push too fast to get past the hard stuff? This is only a partial metaphor.

As an adult woman, cleanliness is a feeling I’m constantly chasing. I fantasize of a body scraped clean of all excrement, all filth inside and out, all excess, all chemicals, all hormones, all blood, all guts, a body left emptied and dry and forever smiling. Many days I feel too dirty to receive affection, squirming against my husband’s hugs and kisses, with playful giggles, I’m dirty, I’m too dirty! Armchair psychology and Law & Order SVU easily explains why.

One week after my surgery, my period comes, and I’m instructed, explicitly, no tampons, no cups. I must stew in my own blood like an orphan basting in a witch’s brew. The blood is thick and sloppy, collecting in the fabric of period-friendly underwear. No leaks for seven days, but to be trapped in the filth of this irony, the most painful kind of menstruation, paired with the inability to find any meaning in it, makes me feel like rotting meat.

By Christmas Eve, my period is nearly over. Only soft shades of pink show up on the toilet paper. As we drive to my father’s house, I find myself making a joke about how when we have a baby, something, something, do things differently, etc. But I catch myself; my words bounce around my throat and settle ugly in my chest. I’m not sure my husband understands why I start crying and ask to change the subject. It’s different for men, whose only physical relationship to pregnancy is orgasming freely and thoroughly, without regard.

I watch my nephew play with his puzzle, and his spirit is so pure, and his joy is so innocent. I tell my father, it’s almost like he’s faking it, by which I mean will all of this truly escape me? When my brother-in-law asks, unwittingly, when we might have a baby, the walls close in around me. I mutter something noncommittal: when it happens, before excusing myself to cry in the upstairs guest room. I sit in a wingback armchair and stare out the window at the deer family grazing in the empty field beside my father’s house, tears rolling gently down my cheeks. I pretend I’m a Victorian widow, so at least I feel glamorous in my sadness.

On New Year’s Eve, I consider a rebranding. This will be the first year, in the last three, where I can unequivocally say a baby is not on the horizon. Not potentially, not accidentally. Maybe next year. If I find a surgeon who will operate on me. If that surgery is effective. If I get to keep my tubes, and ovaries, and uterus. If, after all that, it turns out my destiny does in fact include motherhood. Maybe it will happen then, whenever then arrives. But until then bursts through the door, loud and boisterous and unapologetic, I draft some marketing copy for my own rebranding.

In Panera Bread, I sit down to write—to repurpose my own destiny, to pursue the writing I’ve set aside, capturing the angst and awe of characters like me, but not me. To remember fiction can feel more real than the blood on your fingertips and the lump in your throat. To recall the effervescence of living in a flow state, creating, growing, birthing a work into existence, red-faced and wailing for attention. This is my destiny, in the meantime.

I play my cynical Nineties playlist, which isn’t really Nineties at all, and not all that cynical, it turns out, but the mood courses through me, anyway, and I am buzzing like a belt-loop pager, shimmering like body glitter in the flush of my chest.

But I see a baby in the arms of a woman, baby cheeks so perfectly babyish, and I want it. I want it.

Look, I tell my husband. Turn around, look. There’s a baby.

He glances up at me, turns his body halfway, and sees the baby before returning to his work, unaffected. I watch the mother, cradling the child in its color-block onesie, fashionable and not knowing it.

I begin to cry.