I’ve shut everyone out. No phone calls, no conversations with my parents. Just lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, praying my life will end. Begging for something, anything, to take me out. Because I’m too spineless to end it myself.
The door creaking cuts through the room like a knife.
“Ms. Hardin. Come on back.”
I step on a scale, answer all her questions, go through the motions. Then, check out mentally.
Tears drop onto the paper blanket draped over my lap just as a man in blue scrubs enters the room. He brings the smell of coffee with him, and my stomach turns.
He says words, not many, but he’s definitely speaking as I stare at the poster on the wall directly over his left shoulder.
“You don’t always get to choose what happens to you, but you always choose who you become because of it.”
Those words bounce around my head as I sign the papers in front of me, my hand moving on its own, detached. I endure all the words filling this small space from the mouth of the white-haired man in blue scrubs, not retaining any of it, each sentence slipping through me like I’m not even there.
Words like counseling, aspiration, and ultrasound echo around me as I stare into dark eyes, but see nothing.
Cold leather bites at the sliver of skin exposed through the back of my gown as I lie back on the table. Rough paper crinkles at my thighs when my feet are guided into the stirrups.
He’s still speaking. And though they’re quiet words, they’re so loud.
Too loud.
The wand is inserted. My body tenses against the intrusion. It’s unwanted and unwelcome. It drags me back to that night, the last time anything touched me there, pulling the memory to the surface no matter how hard I try to bury it.
I hate it.
I don’t want to remember.
I try to shut it all down, to slip somewhere quieter, somewhere kinder—anywhere but here. But no matter how tightly I close myself off, how far I try to drift…I can’t escape it.
It’s happening anyway.
“Ms. Hardin.”
My head slowly rocks to the side, eyes falling on the man at my feet.
“Did you hear me?”
No, I haven’t heard a damn word you’ve muttered since you entered the room.
“The pregnancy is no longer developing.”
He waits for a reaction but comes up empty.
“Our plans for today need to be altered.”
My brain scrambles. This baby is already gone? Before I even got here?
I can’t make sense of what I’m hearing, the words not settling, not sticking. They’re just circling, sharp and unreal.
“Ms. Hardin, I’m going to let you get dressed, and the nurse will be back in to discuss where you go from here.”
Tears.
There they are again.
So many tears.
