Twin Blue Lines was written by Anon for unsweetened 2007. This video piece was produced by Elizabeth Adams.
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Twin Blue Lines
By Anon
The doctor’s room is small and spearmint green. Squinting at the computer screen, his finger taps the side of the keyboard.
“You’re pregnant,” he announces, shifting his gaze away from the screen and finally looking at me. This I know.
**
Jump back to me sitting on the toilet with my pants around my ankles, staring at the twin blue lines on the stick in my hand, with all my prior worries – all that I had once thought important – suddenly cascading away to make room for this newer, starker reality.
**
I’m not entirely sure what the appropriate reaction is so I say “ok,” which is both trite and superbly inadequate. He gives me a long, drawn-out look which indicates his agreement. My palm is clammy and grips the arm of the chair. When I move it slightly I can watch the sweat stains evaporate, leaving the leather cold and slick. The silence stretches onward. I stare fixedly at a point just to the left of his face. I wonder if he realises this is my attempt at a kind of fake eye contact.
Finally, “Were you using protection?” This sort of question is never intended as a casual enquiry. It means: ‘did you bring this on yourself by your own carelessness? Are you one of the hundreds of girls who think that it could never happen to them?’
“Yes,” I lie. His disapproval hangs stagnant in the air.
“What do you plan to do with it?” I sit back in my chair and plaster a look of fitting remorse and contrition on my face.
“I’ve decided not to go through with the pregnancy.” I hope I sound decisive because I really don’t feel anything.
“So you will be having a termination.” He stares at me, slicing through my euphemisms. I nod. TERMINATION. A frightening new synonym.
**
I suppose you’re wondering at what point I actually started to feel something. Anything. At what point my dry sarcasm evaporated into a cold, creeping despair. The answer is that it happened gradually, hitting me at random intervals like a smack in the face, knocking me to the floor, and then it was gone.
I was in the shower when I received the first, stinging slap. I bent my head forward until it rested on the cold tiles, pressing my forehead into the silence, the water running hot in my ears. My hand splayed outward, resting on the tiles. My fingernails were rough and jagged. I wondered fleetingly when I had bitten them down; it must have been sometime after the sixty seconds it took for the twin blue lines to appear and before I discovered this new word: TERMINATION. Hot water dripped down my forehead, off the tips of my eyelashes and down my nose. My other hand paused momentarily on my stomach, searching. Then it hit me. I curled my bitten down fingernails into my scalp and squeezed, black spots appearing before my eyes until I closed them tight to shut out the panic flooding my chest.
Then it was gone. I squashed it, the rising tide of realization. Ice numbs. So I made myself cold – freezing the liquid panic so it sat like a glacier in my chest. If I had let it, it would have overwhelmed me. I would have drowned in my flood of panic, alone – there – under the pounding water.
**
I’m going to move forward now, to the ultrasound at the doctor’s surgery. What they don’t tell you is that you have to go in for an ultrasound first to determine how far along you are. I liken it to taking a picture of a building before its date is set for demolition. I lay there, my legs raised in stirrups. The gown is scratching my legs and I try not to think how ludicrously exposed I am. The gown is backless, a token attempt at a kind of faux privacy.
“Spread you legs – you’re tensing up,” the nurse says, her gloved hands exerting a gentle yet insistent pressure on the inside of my knee. I can’t imagine why, I snipe back in my head, my eyes prickling as I stare fixedly at the ceiling. I stare steadily at the fluorescent light above me until the edges around it blur.
“I’m going to put some gel on the probe now… make it more comfortable,” says the nurse’s voice, coming from somewhere between my knees. I close my eyes against the pushing discomfort – not quite pain, but hovering somewhere at the borders. The blurred edges of the fluorescent lights above me have morphed into one giant, shining blur and my face contorts as I stare up at it. My cheeks are cold and wet. The gel coats the inside of my legs now and freezes there in the chill air of the procedure room.
“Seven weeks,” comes the announcement. I’m not sure what to say. (I wish someone would tell me, provide me with an instruction manual which covers all these awkward moments where no words seem inadequate). In the absence of such instruction, I nod. “The procedure itself will take about 15 minutes,” the nurse says, peeling off her rubber gloves with a resounding snap-snap. Fifteen minutes to change the rest of my life.
**
A day later and I’m here at the clinic where they will perform this ‘procedure’. The pinkness of the place is the first things that hits you. There are flowers, magazines and comfortable sofas. In fact, the place virtually oozes discretion. The receptionist is young and blonde. She immediately ushers me into the counsellor’s office. Apparently this is a requirement – to make sure I really want to do this. I want to ask them, does anyone really want to do this?
The counsellor is big, broad and motherly. She carries a clipboard and little judgement. I sit across from her, staring fixedly at my knees.
“So, tell me about your life” she says, and I sense that there are no loaded questions here. So I do. I tell her about University, about the condom that didn’t break and the pill that failed me because I didn’t read the fine print. She nods as I tell her. “We’ll book you in for a week’s time.”
“Thank you.”
**
I’m back in the pink waiting room, clutching my bag of supplies. They don’t tell you about this – the pack of supplies that you have to bring. The spare socks and underwear, the extra large-sized pad to soak up the blood. This is information for the insider’s club. The receptionist greets me kindly and I’m taken into a smaller room.
“Take off your clothes and put on this gown. You can put the rest of your things in a locker,” she says, gesturing. “Pin the key on to the front of your gown so you don’t lose it.” She smiles brightly, all blonde hair and administrative ease, as she hands me a shapeless white gown. Backless, of course.
**
Nurse Hieger watched as the girl momentarily lost her grip on the folds of the hospital gown. She looked up, and their gazes caught on each other. The girl’s mouth tilted sideways in a smile that was at once wry and cold. “Glamorous” she said, gesturing at her gown, but before Nurse Heiger could reply both the smile and the glance were gone and the gaze was dead and numb once more.
As she lay down on the operating table she looked up at the ceiling, her eyes once again fixed upon the bright fluorescent light above her. As the I.V. was fixed in her arm she tensed for a moment, then seemed to surrender.
**
I’m sitting on the toilet again, pants around my ankles, except this time there is blood dripping into the bowl and the stick with its twin blue lines doesn’t seem so scary anymore. I wish someone had told me that the emptiness is so much worse.
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