you are shining some glory

Now life and death seem so curled up in one another: holding, being held, not recognizing a difference. Yesterday I woke up as the box that Schrödinger’s cat is and is not inside. Then, after being honest with myself about how my breasts feel like overripe figs the weight of small boulders, and taking two minutes to pee on a stick, I continued to be a container of is and is not: the cat, I mean potential baby, now definitely existed, but I was still the box that both life and death do hide inside in perpetuity, and so I barely registered a change in my fate. There was no jolt of fear, shame, happiness, or disappointment, just a sly smile about the fullness and inevitability of Things Happening. I now bodily recognize that the act (miracle?) of safe, accessible abortion is perhaps nearly equal in significance to the act (miracle?) of birth. Both concede to the continuation of existence and the recognition of potentiality in every choice made, consciously or not so. The cluster of cells percolating with energy in my womb held the inevitability of its death intimately, an impartial thing in a world where dichotomy and excess is the word and the law. You Are Pregnant. It suddenly became so clear that the real freedom is always the space between: what a cool thing to be so confronted by the true neutrality of every moment, especially when it involves the act of peeing on something. And so the choice of death felt joyous, and I was bubbling over with it all day, caught in a spring-time of my own body that was being mirrored with incredibly acuity by the world around me. This fact was no more evident than in the event of telling C the news, sprawled out as we became on a road verge in the dappled light under blossoming cherry trees. The knowledge of that day being the day of a full moon, among other fortuitous events, was ticking in the back of my mind. Sometimes things are easy: some words spoken into his hair, a brief tension in his body, giggling and head-shaking, the conviction that my body was not a space within his jurisdiction, the collective relief of being able to support one another’s roles in a moment of cross-roads. Further, the collective relief in agreeing that the decision made is the right one (because even when it seems absurd, the cruel imagination will inform you that the other will desire the outcome to be the opposite of what you do). And so termination of one thing will usually bring about the growth of another: it seems in a way that our relationship was deepened and brought further aloft simultaneously. Maggie Nelson jokingly suggests in The Argonauts that abortion should be available to those giving birth up to three days post- full term delivery. In concert with the way she writes about the corporeal and cerebral bizarreness and intensity of choosing to grow a living and eventually conscious thing inside the true jurisdiction of one’s body, this jab at the sanctity of birth and mother-child relationships, not to mention the dainty and shamed way we speak about abortion, felt so elegant, benevolent, cruel, hilarious, and strangely true that I burst into tears the first time I read it. Nelson allowed me to laugh at the absurdity of the charge and power of creating life (giveth, taketh away, etc), which felt like laughing at the spectre of death, and was in all honesty the first time I clearly saw myself moving through the passage of adulthood.

perfectly executed first song off a perfectly executed album, will never tire

fun