Mary Anne

It’s stifling. She feels so confined inside her own home, among her own people. And it isn’t because they don’t love her. It’s because their love is greater than their ability to correctly show it. The scale is imbalanced. Love is equated as pressure. Pressure to make good grades and maintain good behavior so that she can keep being in honors classes and become captain of the cheer team, become captain of the BETA club, become the yearbook coordinator – and that was just Middle School. More recently it was the same schtick, but with added pressure. Make good grades and maintain good behavior so that you can become homecoming queen and valedictorian and most likely to succeed, so that you can get a full ride and go to college and get your bachelor’s and go back to college so you can get your master’s and start a career making $80,000 a year with benefits and a great retirement plan and meet a nice boy and get engaged and get married and buy a big house and have a kid and go to church and have another kid and buy a minivan and have another kid and mow the lawn do the dishes go to work change the diapers cook the meals make him happy and feed the kids and walk the dog and take out the trash and maybe have another kid and buy a bigger house bigger van get promoted make more money maybe have one more kid before you get too old and your ovaries kick the bucket and send the kids to preschool elementary school middle school high school college so they can make good grades maintain good behavior and do something meaningful with their lives like you did didn’t you of course you did or is that what you tell yourself because the alternative is crying yourself to sleep at night because he doesn’t touch you anymore and you never wanted to take that job anyway and the old house felt more like home even if it was smaller and mom and dad are getting too old to take care of themselves anymore and its up to you isn’t everything up to you to take care of them and keep them alive for as long as possible just like you want to be kept alive don’t you or do you you did once but now its hard to tell because all your life you’ve been working towards a goal that you still haven’t reached and now as you lean toward the end of it all you wonder if it was even possible to reach the goal or if it was just some big stick and carrot game God was playing you just for laughs and so you give up get old and die a decade before your body decides to die too. So you run. Run now from the pressure and maybe, just maybe, it’ll never catch you. You meet a nice boy now, rather than later. He’s attractive enough. Probably not what you would pick if you were going to marry someone, but this isn’t about marriage; this is just for fun. He wants to take you places that don’t fit into your parents plan so you go with him. He wants to do things with you that your parents wouldn’t want you to do, so you do them. The whole time he’s distracting you in the back seat of his car, you’re waiting for the universe on your shoulders to just go away and leave you in peace hoping praying even that this might bring peace and relief. But it doesn’t. Instead the universe laughs and grows heavier. The universe laughs and reaches down inside your belly and grows heavier. A month goes by. No blood. Two months. Heavier. Three months. The universe isn’t laughing now. It’s shaking and terrified. Shaking and terrified – and heavier.