25

THERE WERE MANY nights I didn’t sleep. I’d lock myself in the bathroom, look at my reflection in the mirror, cry, worriedly look at the new, darkening patches on my face: jaw line, cheek, mouth. And then I’d get in bed to toss and turn. I didn’t call the man from the cave. We saw each other only once more; he was stressed out and talked about noise and a new cinematographic project. He looked at me and asked if I was going to come back. I’d disappeared for weeks. His eyes filled with tears. His oval face was unrecognizable, and I wondered if the boy’s face would be the same shape. He showed me a music video in which a man with a long beard was fishing. The sound made me cry. I imagined possible scenarios and felt nauseous and told him I’m hungover. He brought me water. He said it’s almost a year since we met. He told me other fairly confusing things. He was sober, but there was still a turbid dialogue that concluded like this:

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Married?”

“Yes.”

“Your ID says married?”

“Yes, moron, obviously. And it has my husband’s name. How stupid.”

“And you’re getting divorced?”

“Yes, clearly.”

But before the dialogue ended like this, I told him it was possible I was going to leave the country, I mentioned I was a little sick, and I told him that our story needs to end along with other lies and nonsense that flowed easily, knowing my love for this man was as real as the fetus but that this was also insufficient to sustain anything. And that idea made me think maybe the fetus will sense this and fall a little, desist. In the middle of that idea, I saw a photo on the fridge and thought about what this child of ours would be like, what his eyes would be like, and the nostalgia like a multitude of little pieces of trash or gaping holes or red stones started to cover my body to the point of cutting off my breath, squeezing my belly that now contains an embryo. We made a baby, and this excites me, overwhelms me, and makes me run.