A Still Unknown City
By Jess Wright
life writing | 9 min read | TW: suicidal ideation, self-harm
I walked out of my first gynecological exam with a sore candle between my thighs. I was thirty-three years old, and I lived in Texas. We drove everywhere.
The moment I knew that I needed a pap smear and that nobody else was going to make the appointment for me, we were driving south on I-35, from the airport in Austin back to San Antonio. The highway was choked with cars. Billboards shouted at us to pray, vote Republican, drive a tank, and visit Schlitterbahn.
I was, at that moment, furious with my spouse: “We were going to try for a child. Instead, we’ve spent the whole summer talking about whether you get to fuck our friend.”
“I think there might be a problem with your timeline,” L said. They braked sharply behind a sixteen-wheeler, then spun the wheel to change lanes. “You haven’t ever even had a pap smear.”
“I asked you to help me book an appointment,” I said. Even I could hear how limp this sounded. I felt like a child myself, unable to pass through this gate into the world of parents.
The question was not whether a pap smear would turn up cervical cancer. Rather, it was whether I could allow my body to be worked upon—and, more specifically, whether I could allow myself to be penetrated. I pressed my forehead to the car window, the glass as hot as nausea.
This was the preface to an isolating year. We were both coming to recognize the ways in which we parented one another, but as L slowly withdrew from that role, it wasn’t clear any longer in what sense we worked as a unit. In the moment—my bare feet in the hot car, the flashes of anger in L’s knuckles on the gear stick, the feeling of impasse stuck in my throat—I thought that I had reached the nadir of loneliness.
When we reached the suburbs, we stopped at Target for a jumbo box of crayons. L loaded my basket with packs of colored biros, white-out, coloring pencils. To tell you the truth, this was better than any post-argument sex we ever had.
Whenever I am brought back to a space of dismantlement, I learn a new art. I did not have a child that summer, but I did destroy an old copy of Wuthering Heights, page by page, excising fragments of verse from the storms and the folds and the devils. There are a lot of devils in that book.
Also, I booked my first pap smear.
***
I named two desires that summer: to try for a baby; to finish my book.
L named two desires that summer: to buy a home; to open our marriage.
***
L and I sat in the waiting-room for close to an hour. A pregnant woman waited across from us with two young children, who traded screaming back and forth along with their iPad. I leaned close to L and whispered in their ear, “Perhaps we shouldn’t have a baby after all?”
L smiled. They’d told me years previously that they hadn’t wanted children in their first marriage. All they really wanted, I was beginning to realise, was a dog and a couple of girlfriends.
The nurse took me in for vitals. She asked, “Do you have any medical conditions?” I asked her if osteoporosis counted. She paused, nodded. “Do you menstruate?” Every month.
Back in the waiting room, a woman announced to the man beside her that she had lost a pound and a half. I held my own news inside my teeth like a hard candy. When I could stand it no longer, I said to L, “I lost weight this summer.”
L: “That is not a surprise.”
“I haven’t been this low since I was in treatment.”
L asked how much I had lost. When I told them, I wanted them to be more shocked than they were. Pride rose, then shame. We walked into the examination room together.
***
When L came out as polyamorous, my body began to change. Food made me sick. I turned faint under the heat of the shower. My breasts thinned. In the gym beneath our apartment, I dialed the running machine up to maximum speed and incline, and then closed my eyes.
I was in a dance with appetite. At mealtimes, toast scraped at the root of my tongue. Apples turned my stomach with the smooth wax of their skin. L fed kale and frozen banana into the blender. They made pancakes. They served plain rice and eggs. I licked the edges of teaspoons.
We had lived in San Antonio for a year, but the only friend in our time zone who I’d call in an emergency had just become L’s girlfriend. Late at night when the two of them were out dancing, I lay in the dark of the bathroom closet and imagined killing myself in the trash room. I reasoned that I would first leave a note on the door, warning other apartment occupants that there had been a cockroach invasion, so not to come in.
I didn’t want to be dead. I wanted to be unwell. I wanted to be so unwell that L would realise I was unhappy. For six months, I was a fugue with variations of self-abuse: skipping meals, ten stripes across the palm with a plastic coat hanger, boxing my own ears, hurling myself against walls, drawing ghost maps on my arms with the kitchen knives, welting the back of my writing hand with a heavy-duty scrubbing brush. Toward the end, I smashed a glass bottle into the sink and filled the kitchen with finely ground shards. L made me stand unmoving until they brought shoes to me. Afterward, I waited in the kitchen doorway, holding the kitten, while L swept the floor and wiped down surfaces and picked shards of glass out of the dishcloth. Perhaps around midnight, it occurred to me to shut the kitten in our bedroom and get down on my knees to vacuum the crevices between the kitchen tiles.
Early in the new year, the kitten—batting for a feather, leaping in the doorway, racing from the top of the couch to the shoe rack—fell to the floor in a stiff plank, foam gathering at his jaws, eyes flat. L called to me. We stood together, watching his twitching slow.
It moved in me like masonry then, stone grating on stone, how quickly love ends.
We called the emergency vet. We watched the tremor in the kitten’s legs as he circled the dining table. We helped him onto the couch. We carried him into the bed.
After this, I stopped hurting myself.
***
Who is managing your care plan?
No one.
What medication are you on?
None.
What supplements are you taking?
None.
When was your last bone scan?
Ten years.
And you haven’t ever had a pap smear?
I shrugged. Nothing. No exam of any kind.
The gynecologist smiled. “Let’s do this!” she said.
***
Two months into L’s new relationship, we bought a house. I lit candles in every room, made edits on my book, and folded zines. I worked in the sunroom that looked out over the yard, with walls of pinewood and glass. The floor was chipped green tiles, threaded with patterns like a labyrinth. Lying down on the floor of this room felt like coming home after a long journey.
I told myself that in this new house I would begin to take care of myself. I booked a pap smear and, afterward, a bone scan. I ate energy bars and swallowed vitamin D. I held ice in my fists until the ache of cold ran down my wrists like water, a safe pain that was supposed to satisfy my longing. I drew the line at swallowing Cholula hot sauce, which my therapist recommended, and this is perhaps why I found myself night after night with my hand rustling in the knife drawer.
***
During the pap smear, L looked on quietly. Their girlfriend, who had offered to accompany me, was not there. Afterward, we waited at the front desk to arrange a bone scan.
Some hours later, back in my sunroom, I lit a candle and lay down on the floor.
***
L’s girlfriend was a witch. She offered to perform a limpia on the new house, but by the time we moved in, she and I were on tender ground. I would talk with her for hours, then avoid her for weeks. Late in the autumn, I sent her a passage from a book on ancient healing practices: the Hittite goddess Kamrušepa, responsible for midwives, healing, and magic, has unknown origins, but “may be a personification of smoke used in divinatory practices tied to sacrifices,” although the name perhaps alludes to “a still unknown city.” This smoke was the texture of our friendship, shifting through hands, absorbed into lungs, altering the body as it vanished.
***
Wanting a child has always felt irresponsible. My bones are full of holes. I have spent hours trying to punch holes in the universe.
One late December morning, years earlier, I had walked with my aunt, a gynecologist, alongside a partially frozen river in south-west England, brown leaves crunching beneath our boots. She said to me, “Are you and L planning to have children?”
I shook my head. “We’re both depressed,” I said. “Also, I don’t have citizenship, neither of us has a permanent job, and the planet has roughly another thirty years left in it.”
I didn’t mean it. Not entirely. I simply couldn’t bear the thought of opening my body to examination, inviting my aunt to imagine me, ripe and splitting.
She looked at me sideways. “Some people don’t have a choice,” she said.
It wasn’t clear whether she was reminding me that people have children in the most difficult circumstances, or if she was warning me of how our choices narrow with age. I didn’t ask.
For almost a year, L and I located our hesitation to have a child in the status of my body. The pap smear. My bones. The weight loss. The bruises. What should have been obvious was too painful to look at. My body was only a feint.
***
The gynecologist wrapped up quickly. She ordered a bone scan. She removed her gloves and washed her hands. L and I walked to the car and drove in circles through the parking garage, searching for the exit.
