I found a phone number in my back pack today. It's from Israel. It's on a small piece of lined paper, written in awkward blue pen on a line near the top. It's the type of paper a waiter might use to scribble orders on. It doesn't have his name on it, but I know it's his.
I was shocked when I found it crumpled up next to my chapstick and in a pocket towards the front. I just stared at it, as people filed out of the class that just ended, and felt thrown back to another world. It's a bit of him: something he held and wrote on and passed along to me. Everything about it screams his name.
It's 1AM in Israel when I find the number. I know exactly where he is. Him and his bar and his restaurant and his belgium waffles and his cigarettes and the best sorbet in the world. I feel like he's so much closer. Like, he's up town by Columbia, close and reachable. I close my eyes and picture it. The bar, the bike, the secret moments in public.
The size of this planet is screwing with my head. I feel that I miss him, or there, or the moment, or the cigarettes. I cannot fathom that he is so far away-- so far from me, so far from the bit of him I'm holding between my fingers. But here he is, and I think "So, I've been carrying you along with me this whole time."
Due to a special request, I've decided to revive the blog. I don't really know why I stopped...maybe because I've been so busy that I haven't been able to see any of my friends, let alone think enough to write. Who could have guessed?
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Today, the New York Times has an
excellent feature about women in Africa, mostly teenagers, who have have experienced fistulas while giving birth. This basically means that, because their birth canals are so narrow and they lack sufficient medical attention, their insides (inc. urethra and bowels) are ripped apart as the baby comes down the birth canal....
Five hours with your blood and bowels and baby all smeared around in the equator sun on a bumpy carriage on a dusty path.
This image will haunt me all day--the feeling that I'm lying on my back with my dead baby's head coming out from between my legs and I'm frozen in horror as my insides split apart and lay in chaos within me.
I want to puke.
How can women bear to live in a world where their culture forces them to marry young but can't save them from the ailments that result when tiny, undeveloped people give birth? Can the culture even help it? How can they then shun them away as they spew out urine and feces uncontrollably? These girls wallow in their own shit that someone else tossed them into and can't pull them out from.
I imagine being 12 and pregnant; I imagine being now and pregnant. The inexplicable nature of human reproduction that nags my own body implodes itself in them with no one to hold it up. Perhaps this is feminism: that I can feel at one with their ravaged bodies.
I picture being in Africa with the condition that
I had: being unaware that my ovary was growing a toxic ball and slowly commiting suicide as it turned on itself; my tubes turning black; the eggs too infected to escape. And I picture the moment that I avoided with surgery--the moment that was so close, the moment I skimmed past with just a little scar-- the moment my body goes into shock from the dead organ within. I see myself convulsing on the floor in violent ceizures and dying slowly on a straw mat in a mud hut; or during the five hour buggy ride to the nearest hospital; and never even knowing why.
