Month: December 2009

I’m trying to snooze because I’ve opened my eyes at 7am despite having fallen asleep at 3am, and it’s unfair with my mind that my body is so used to waking up early no matter what. It’s Sunday, after all, so I should try to get some more rest. I toss and turn with the music on, so whenever there’s a song that doesn’t mingle well with my dreams, I have to move my arm and press a button to change it, resetting the whole cycle. Suddenly, the phone rings.

“Good morning, girl!” says a cheerful voice at the other side of the line. I recognize that voice all too well, and I laugh. I always laugh when I hear him. It’s not that there’s anything funny about him, but it’s rather related to the joy he brings.

He’s speaking in English. He’s talking really fast and I don’t understand everything he’s saying, partly because I’m partly deaf, and partly because I’m partly sleepy. He tells me all about his recent nightly outing and this club full of teenagers and twelve francs for the entrance and altogether eighteen francs or something and I’ve no idea how much in yen is one Swiss franc so I mistakenly assume from his tone that it must be expensive. I’m listening intently, stupidly wondering why we’re having this conversation in English, as if I had forgotten our custom of alternating languages indistinctly. It could’ve very well been French: then I would’ve been in real trouble. I’m doing my best to recover that language from the shipwreck of oblivion in order to broaden our verbal spectrum.

He’s still talking and I’m not saying much. I’m a zombie with Asperger’s: I love that he’s calling but can’t understand why he’s doing so. All the love in my heart is not enough to make up for my chronic social autism, so I interpret this sudden bout of upbeat verbosity as—

“Are you drunk?”

Every morning I wake up thinking exactly the same thing: how strange it is to be in love! Not to merely reciprocate someone else’s unexpected fondness, but to spontaneously begin to feel something warm flowing inside like a new kind of blood. In the shower, on the wall, there is a jelly octopus clasping its tentacles around a fish, attesting his earlier presence in my home. I stare at it and think: how strange, indeed! To be happy and not to doubt for one second that this joy is real, to know that there is no need to look hard in order to find the tiniest remnant of a reddish cinder—for everything, everything around me seems to nod and say: he loves you too!

What right does anyone but me have over my body? Who decides what my future should look like and how I should handle my relationships? Why is everyone revolving around us women and judging us as if we didn’t have minds of our own, as if our bodies didn’t belong to us?

Emergency contraception has been prohibited in Colombia, and my head is boiling with anger. I’m angry because a society that will not take responsibility over its hungry and uneducated children is telling us that it’d rather have more unhappy citizens (both mothers and children) abandoned to their luck than give a woman freedom to make a decision over her own priorities.

To use the “child as God’s miracle” as an argument against abortion and/or emergency contraception is to deny the fact that children are human beings and not just cute little pets to cuddle. It’s like getting married for the sole joy of having a wedding. Children don’t only need the smile of a loving mother (who will of course be thrilled to have her life truncated because of this unwanted step) in order to thrive, but also slightly more basic things like food and clothes and good education, which in many cases the mother cannot provide. I wonder if those who go preaching about how beautiful it is to have a baby know what it really means to give birth to a person. A person’s lifetime usually spans a few decades, so I don’t see what’s so fantastic about letting yourself and somebody else down from their very appearance on Earth and for so, so, so long.

I refuse to let tissue grow inside me if it is bound to become a fundamentally unhappy human being. My parents have given me so many opportunities and so much joy that I cannot conceive the idea of denying my own children the amazing kind of life I have had. I cannot fathom why anyone should be denied such right, and most important, why women should be denied the right to treat their bodies as what they are: their own.

In Colombia, a woman’s future is deemed to be worth less than that of a pair of cells. This is how important we are to those who rule over us.

Sometimes I feel like, despite having done my fair share of travelling, I haven’t actually been anywhere. Maybe it’s just because every time I’ve planned to travel I’ve ended up in the middle of nowhere.