Ship Wrecked

My period is three days late.

I took a pregnancy test, one of the 'detects five days before your missed period' ones.

It was negative.

There is only one chance that it happened...one chance from this whole month.

That's how unapproachable I've made myself.

I still fantasize about the test being wrong.

I feel guilty any time I want a glass of wine.

Guiltier when I have one.

I feel a small shiver every time my stomach is noisy, or when I'm hungry in the morning and the thrill of nausea passes through my throat.

When anything that my memory can associate with that brief time period that I knew I was pregnant happens my brain is all too eager to jam a mental pencil down so hard to connect the dots.

I hate it.

I wish there was some way I could disengage the part of my memory that hates me back.
It knows how badly I want to be able to live my life like I did before.
Before Bob and I even decided to try this year.

I wanted to smoke a cigarette so badly today.

I smoked one a week ago when I hurt my back at work. It was a reserve clove I stashed away for a bad day.
And I hadn't even thought about wanting it until that afternoon.

But that's the way addiction works.

And I am addicted to hurting myself.

It's why I wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares once a week now.
I dream that bob is furious with me.
So angry he can't look at me. In the dream it's justified. I did something god awful. I kissed someone, fucked someone, or didn't show up when I promised I would.

I dream I stashed meat away in Kim's apartment where I'm catsitting right now.
She's a vegetarian.
In my dream I just filled her fridge with shiny pink chicken cutlets and stuffed her cupboard with raw hamburger. Porkchops slithered over each other to fall out of the cupboards I'd hidden so many of them there.
She showed up with the vegetarian police. In mirrored aviators and everything.
They found every last piece of raw meat, and they forced me to eat it.
Long strings of sausages, pasty with coagulated animal fat, ground beef turning from rosy to grey in earthworm shaped squiggles, jamming them into my mouth until I gagged.

When I wake up from the dreams I lie awake twisting the ice cold blade of guilt in my guts. In the dark, it is impossible to fully emerge from the cage of awful feelings. I don't fight my way out. I don't feel like I deserve to.
At least I feel like smoking is a pain I can control.
Binging is my own choice.
Drinking and carousing and behaving like a moron so that the next day I hate every moment of the night before is a way of controlling the burning pain of being in this place where I am so completely left out of the decisions that are made about what I get to have and what is ripped away from me.

I want to push every good thing out of my life and fess up to the monster I am:
The barren wasteland of a human being who has never held anything but death between her legs.

I want to go out to the desert and light a fire and sit inside it and wait for the stars to come to me or me to go to them.

There is nothing more lonely than this place of no control, no knowledge, and no justice.

The world is a wicked place and cruelty is rewarded while kindness is punished with humiliation.

I want to be locked inside a chest and dropped into the bottom of the ocean.

I want to be buried alive with the seed of a tree in my stomach that grows into a great oak while I writhe beneath and its roots choke me to sleep.

I want to be a great wooden ship marooned on a sand dune surrounded by lightening struck trees. A place of desolation where it is so dry, your eyes cannot produce tears.