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.
I took those heavy books to our trip because I didn’t want to come out to you as shallow, which I ended up doing anyway. You had written a dedication on the book you had sent me—you perceived me as intelligent, interesting, and strong, it said—and I wanted to live up to that image. And the problem was exactly that: trying to emulate that person you had conceived out of my writing. My usual disregard for other people’s opinions about me suddenly turned into an uncomfortable bout of self-conscience, perhaps because I was so fascinated with you, or the idea of you, or even the mere possibility of having someone to be corny with after all this time.
I mention this, even though it doesn’t matter anymore, because it still stings. It still stings that I actually thought less of myself in your presence because you were such a big scholar and I was just an undergrad student who knew nothing about anything. After all, you—you of all people, genius among geniuses, crème de la crème—had chosen me for this holiday fling, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to measure up to your standards, so I thought I’d cover up my tiny ignorant self with academic books and unfinished homework at a time when I was even doubting whether I had chosen the right path for my future. I was a fool to think myself unworthy of you, because eventually you deemed me so.
So there you have it. I am shallow, and I don’t get jokes, and I seldom exercise. I’m non-conformist and grouchy, and I don’t read nearly as much as you do. But you should have seen all that naturally coming out of me, and not oozing through the cracks of my imperfect mask of shame. I’m sorry I tried so hard to please you.
What bothers me the most is that I still see you in my dreams, and in those dreams you finally take me for who I am. But who cares now whether you could like me or not in spite of myself? A writer could not ever spend her life beside a man who lives in utter silence.