“Sometimes,

in the deepest, quietest parts of the night,

as the black sky turns opaque

and loneliness abounds,

I find my hands creeping up

to the dark,

angry slash on my abdomen

still a vibrant red,

eleven years after the fact.

My fingers caress this furious divot

as my thoughts begin to run wild,

uninhibited

by the cage in which they are usually kept.

“for my own good”,

I tell myself-

or at least I think so.

They form a cascading waterfall

of words and images,

exclamations and questions,

ruminations and concerns

that rush towards the front of my mind

with a frightening energy

until I have no choice

but to set down my previous focus

and pay them attention.

I think of the space that once held

my uterus and ovaries-

the sacred place where hope once lay

and life began.

And I try to picture what it must look like,

now that my precious organs are gone.

Has it become a yawning,

cavernous,

seemingly-endless black hole

of scorched earth that has all

but been forgotten?

Are its edges infused with the searing-white anger

I feel daily,

thinking about the surgeon

who promised me health with this sacrifice,

but never delivered?

Has it become a boundaryless vessel

to contain all of the guilt that constantly threatens to consume me?

The guilt that asks me why I rushed the surgery,

and prioritized my pain relief

instead of just waiting two weeks

to freeze my eggs

for the future?

The guilt that tells me that I have no right to mourn all my losses

while my two healthy, living children sit beside me.

Has this space become a maze of scar tissue,

morbidly decorating my surviving organs with twisted rings,

its new veins

steadily pumping blood to the tune of

my desperate longing?

Longing

to create more life

to keep the mitzvah of mikvah

to have a normally functioning female body

to be like everyone else.

Painful musings dance around my mind

until an intolerable feeling of desperation creeps through my veins,

and freezes my heart.

And I’m left wondering how much more of these thoughts and feelings I can take

before it just shatters into a million translucent pieces.

So I carefully remove my fingers from the furrowed skin beneath them,

while securing my wild thoughts once again beneath their chains

and berate myself harshly for ever allowing myself to think about

before.

Before grief was palpable beneath my fingertips,

Before hope was carved out of my body with a scalpel,

Before I became sterile.”