Ana

By Trinity Francis

In the winter, we’d sit in his car, listening to the snow. Christmas had just missed the white, and roofs were still coated despite the sun. The ice on the pavements pushed pedestrians along, slippery and wet beneath their shoes. The chill in the air was unmoving. His car was in the garage this particular week, so we couldn't sit together like we usually did. But he'd still get me to the appointment, he said, and sit in the waiting room while it happened.

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It started small. Even before he found out, he began inching closer to me in his sleep, burying his fingers in the smallest crooks of my body. He looked where he touched me now, left a warmth along my skin and in the pit of my stomach.

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It was slowly blooming at that time. Though it was unclear to me when it began. For that period, I saw red. That was an early sign. Words we hadn't dared exchange in the past began to paint the walls of our room a bloody shade, one argument at a time. Reconciliation was quick. "You know I love you, right?" he'd say, and I'd crawl inside him while we waited for the noise to pass. 

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I had started watching his hands a lot, rubbing circles along my thighs or stroking the curves of my knuckles. Even gripping his steering wheel or thumbing his pen, I couldn't take my eyes off them. I willed them to hold my stomach and carry the weight of it all for both of us. 

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Nine weeks on the dot, they told me. For two weeks after we had found out, it felt like ours, and I pictured a life it could fit into, though some days I wanted to peel my skin off layer by layer and jump out of my body. But I couldn’t. I tried to run. From him, from work, friends and family, from myself especially. I’d have traded it all for nothing. 

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He held my hand on the way in, talked of nothing while we waited. It was swift; two swabs, a scan and a small pill to swallow. In two days, it would be over, and what had been growing between us would begin to wilt away, leaving a pile of fading petals at my feet. Only I would hear them crunching beneath me, forming piles of dust I couldn't walk through.