Jigsaw
Do you think I had a choice?
Or that I could have made a better one?
No, you see, I love puzzles. I looked at my life from every single angle, and, unlike some people, I thought it out.
And I know I'm right.
I remember being a little girl, sitting at a table at Thanksgiving when I was four. The big attraction, as always, was our dining room table, which came from Louis the XIV's palace. I remember deliberately scratching it with my fork. My father's hand slapping mine. My mother's ice-cold eyes at the sight of his deed. The fighting, followed by Shane's tears and slamming doors.
I spent a lot of my childhood in my room.
Why I remember that day, I don't know. Just one moment in the hundreds of moments in which my parents argued.
When I was a little girl, I didn't have a doll. My favorite game was Operation, actually. The Operation Man was a true McMahon; cut up into compartments.
I'm like the butterfly in his stomach.
Acted out early, and so did Shane, but his rebellion was encouraged, expected. Dad was proud of him, because it was more proof that he was a McMahon. But I, a girl, had been expected to be a lady.
Too bad for Mommy and Daddy that I was never one for rules.
So I just broke away. Had a fake ID before I was fourteen, a boyfriend when I was younger. I smoked and drank so much that I developed a smoker's cough before I turned twenty.
No one seemed to notice that the harder I laughed, the louder I spoke, the more I was trying to conceal.
I had my first "necessary surgery" when I was eighteen.
They think it's easier if you do it more than once. I'm living proof that it gets harder. Every. Damn. Time. Sometimes, the situation hurts because you know you could love it, but you know you won't have the support. Sometimes it's a cold rationale, because you hated the father and hope that that time in the youth hostel bathroom was the last time you'll see him. You'll never be in Paris again, anyway.
I can count the stretch marks, the footprints I hide. Four in all.
But I'm not sorry.
I haven't ever felt the warmth of a real love. I know that, right now, I couldn't bring life into the world. Not unless there's real support.
I'm also proof that marriage without love is a mistake.
So I fly around the world, standing at his right hand, his diamond on my finger, but can't feel the beat of my own heart around him. He wants to have children so badly that he's willing to move across the country to be closer to some fertility specialist.
But nothing can grow when love is absent.
I say this, but I'm not guilty. If I loved Hunter, I wouldn't want to have his baby. I don't want to spread along the genetics of a hateful man and a robot of a woman. Let the line end here, in my thick, concrete body.
Let the disease die out with me.