Stable, not as in not getting sicker. Stable, as in declining at increments the doctors won’t disclose. I learn this cipher from an online forum. A woman is stable for a decade and then, without notice, very sick. Her decline fed to her in code, all those years.

I close my laptop. Stable, as in I feel held by my marriage. Stable, as in I have been casing this café for men I would like to fuck. My early 20s rising as goose pimples along my thighs.

The online forums don’t admit that, after learning you are very sick, you feel a relentless need to commit terrible acts. The body is already bad, spoiled strands of genes turning your interiority rotten. A slow, deliberate asphyxiation.

You could speed the final moments to your side. It’s your right.


::

A man I was in love with told me he had been accused of rape. The details were sparse. They had been drinking, became drunk. By the morning, she told him their night was a mistake, one he orchestrated without showing her the door to leave it.

I was assaulted at nineteen and raped by twenty. Earlier, and not by this man.

I replied to his confession with nothing, unable to gather my words to press him for more. He wouldn’t have disclosed the full extent of more. But silence is the worst apparition that complicity can take. Later I would learn this intimately. Until then, we fucked in the bed where he might have raped another, and I was silent.


::

My friend says, Confessional writing only succeeds if you can resist coating yourself with the gold brush. For the sake of this essay, please assume that I agree with him.

I cannot write, I am sick. Feel bad for me. But sometimes, I say it in my head when things are not going my way.

::

You have a victim complex, my therapist tells me. She is irritated, ready to dispute my story about a hospital appointment with two male doctors. My narrative starred a tired cast: men with power acting to undermine the autonomy of a body with insufficient power, mine. One doctor performed a [unneeded] physical exam, while the other [unneeded] doctor questioned my ability to select my own medical team, to decline [unneeded] medication, to say no.

To say no. Who am I, the young female patient, to say no?

She repeats: You see the world as victimizing you.

Except I don’t, not really. I have victimized my body and men have victimized it for me. These are actions endured by any woman, under the guise that her flesh is worth hating. Or worse, it is worthless. Having a worth sets limits. I learned when an ex-boyfriend decided not to kill me that my worth was a waning light. My value is just enough to not be dead.

I cancel my next therapy appointment over text message, convincing myself that I will reschedule when I can articulate a response. But the threads never weave together. The best I have is I used to live like brushfire, but now the field appears very still.


::

I like to think that now, now I could ask him if he raped that woman. This is how I flatter myself, a gold brush in hand.

::

My right lung is stabbing its presence. I am in my friend’s backyard. It’s May and I am clutching a Christmas mug of licorice tea. I have been crying.

A share for a share? my friend asks, and I am reminded of Amy Berkowitz’s series of imagined paintings in bird’s-eye view. Her fantastical oeuvres entitled Brilliant Women Talking About Rape Again (Instead of Talking About Their Art or Any Other Topic) where women are predestined to discuss the danger of their bodies. What harm they have endured and could endure in the future. During these exchanges, the former retreat of their art or professional ambition becomes a mirage, an oasis blocked by their own bodies.

After my friend shares, we become quiet. Eventually, I say, I feel like we’re holding everything together with such fine threads, and she nods without speaking. Our silence regained.

It’s a small mercy I’m still able to do this, to be here writing to you.

::

In the earliest weeks with my now-husband, another man proposed a four-pronged list:

1. LEAVE OUR PARTNERS FOR EACH OTHER.

2. HAVE AN AFFAIR.

3. BECOME FRIENDS WHO STAGE DOUBLE DATES LIKE A PURSED-MOUTH SMILE.

4. STOP SPEAKING, FOR A TIME OR FOREVER.

I refused to choose, knowing that if he loved me how he said, only the first option would exist for him. The others were moves in a game. I understood because I was approaching life like a game, too. Half-hearted, unsure of my next move, I would upend the board to miss my turn.

The other man had met me in my early 20s. Every day with him was cinematic in a way that felt fraught with its own fatality. He cared about me when I stood before him, invested in the fact that I was 25 and fun to fuck. So I invested in how I could become a prettier body for him to fuck.

Of course, I wanted his love.

Of course, I was in love with him.

During those years, how many times did I ignite my life to trigger the incendiary story that followed? Needed to know what would happen if I did x, could not keep myself from x. Was obsessed with x. I slipped into the trope of the bored young woman like a thrifted dress. Too shy to tell men what I wanted, too self-destructive to speak beyond a yes. I entered burdened dynamics, fascinated by how the foundation tilted, its burgeoning fractures.

Life was not a home I inhabited. I hated myself in that quiet apathetic way, my existence offering no comfort. To distract from my anxious hum, the choking numbness, I inserted myself into terrifying stories with men. I became a paper doll character, made up for hands to tear me apart. Or so I needed to appear. Whether my delicacy was an act or the reality, I wanted to destroy myself and I looked for men to do it for me.

This is a piece of self-mythos I can never fully grip: whether I was the chooser or the chosen.

::

I read that my astrological chart is tilted with Gemini placements, tilting my eyes to wander through every room I enter. Today, I flirted with a barista, only half-aware that my right hand was covering my wedding ring.


::

When the other man and I stopped talking, I lost my mind for a summer. In this story, I am 25, and as the sun blazes in both our cities, my best friend calls to discuss having me committed. To an eavesdropper, I imagine her tone as startlingly blasé.

You might like some peace, she says.

And I agree with the superficial agreement of a woman who cannot fathom peace.

But our talk held no dénouement. I remained in a one-bedroom apartment above a highway, fishing fingers down my throat to catch the demons myself. Or, to expel me from me. I was never quite sure what I wanted.

::

I don’t know why I’m transcribing my confessions for strangers to read, especially since confessional writing feels like a form of lying: the truth forced through poetic sieves, the past written in a funhouse of mirrors. Obscure to protect yourself. Blend the landscape to fictionalize, to paint over.

If these acts define lying, then I have lied pathologically.

Plain speech requires a slow Tuesday afternoon, a packed café. You lean across the table, causing the ice cubes in my G&T to rattle. You ask, What really happened, Lauren?

I will hope, in these instances, to have your answers.

But the truth and I keep strained company. After I was assaulted, and later raped, I didn’t tell anyone for seven years. Instead, I confessed another traumatic incident. It infected my writing, took up pages of a manuscript. Lorded over coffee dates with friends. I had a story to tell, so I told it, believing the events were a matter of community, of safety.

In writing and in friendship, I wanted the confessional mode to bring me peace. I bathed the act in religion-tinged words like catharsis and revelation, and I felt hopeful.

Instead the learning came swiftly: living through trauma is less painful than its retellings. Retellings to persuade the listener that your trauma is justified, has been earned. Retellings where your agency is worn away when someone else finds out, but not from you. You would have never told that person. Still they know, and now they want to hear the story directly from you, for you to explain why you poisoned that nice man’s well.

There is always a nice man. It’s an even better story if he is a genius and you’re the woke banshee raging through the community to taint his reputation. Your reasons are never good enough. You weren’t supposed to disrupt the silence that allowed him to speak through art or in the company of other anointed men, even when that silence was keeping your voice a flicker, a breath away from snuffing out.

::

I married the first person I told that I was raped. That is the happy variation of telling.

The second person I told was another woman, a close friend at the time. I said, My ex-boyfriend didn’t care if the sex was consensual or not. We were eating Dairy Queen blizzards on rue Jarry and she didn’t acknowledge my words. Her red spoon didn’t even pause to hover, splitting a second in the dead air.

She stopped speaking to me, altogether, soon after.

If I were an Introduction to Psychology textbook, I would exclaim: Correlation does not imply causation! But I am myself and I am unsure.

Who is the confessional act even meant to benefit? Me, as the confessor, prying myself open for your scrutiny and subsequent rejection?

Sometimes even I think there must be something sick about all this confessionalism is a line written by Kate Zambreno in Heroines. Her words are my pet preoccupation. To write in this way, I cannot heal. Wounds must be reveled in, kept open for being creatively fruitful. To trigger my creative fits. If I continue to confess, I will live here, forever sickening.

::

We’re turning you into a sick hypochondriac, a new doctor says. Abdominal pain I self-diagnosed as a fresh tumor is an entrapped nerve. I can’t exercise or sit in hard chairs without a fiery, swollen ball forming. Yet my pain is next to nothing, only a thing caught that my body won’t release. It feels apt, to be a variation on a theme.

The problem is I am sick. I am incurable. My organs gather benign growths that will, over time, cause my lungs to fail. For the last two years, the illness has remained stable. Stable, as in I have a six-centimeter tumor on my 12-centimeter kidney. Stable, as in I don’t yet need oxygen to breathe.

But you knew, didn’t you? You knew you were sick before the diagnosis, said an ex-boyfriend, the list-giver. There is no truth to feed his questions.

As a child, I craved a physical embodiment for my pain, so I made myself sick. By considering my personhood immaterial, I reduced myself to a body. Sickness was an affliction I courted, sought it out. Scrolling pro-ana websites in the early 2000s, my eyes lighted on slim wrists adorned by red-beaded bracelets, blue veins pushing against skin, the skin often scarred. Unlike what the media decried, these websites did not herald sickness as a glamorous, modelesque choice. Rather the sites offered an outlet for personal suffering, saying: Yes, be sad. Yes, continue to hate yourself. But turn it into a DIY hobby, a passion project. Normalize it.

As Tyra Banks might declare, Misery, but make it fashion.

At 14 years old, I didn’t feel I deserved to be sad, although I had my reasons. And I was sad, sad like my heart was encased in weight, weight that heavied my chest until the ribs ached. This sensation never felt normal. It was just sitting inside me.

Before the websites, starving wasn’t an outlet I considered, but once I began, I never fully walked away from it. Physically or emotionally in my romantic trysts, I starve as I exist, shrinking away from health and love. The refrain of my life has been: You can never hurt me, because once you do, I’ll hurt myself worse. I control the pain. When a body is taken without consent, the prerogative becomes regaining control at any cost. That cost was always going to be me. I had nothing else to give, or to take away.

::

My husband won’t tell me why he’s following an ex-girlfriend on Instagram. I don’t care in any concrete way. Our relationship spans over five years, and when its parameters make me restless, I sometimes reach for a sore spot to push, brushing my body up against a fight. So often, desirability hinges on other people. The other man understood this truth when he confessed the weeping woman on the train, how she slipped her number into his palm. He could have been her hero for the night, but no, he came home to Montréal to fuck me. How lucky.

Stable, as in I’m the body worth returning to.

Stable, as in I’m so comforted by chaos that I’m sometimes bored out of my skull without it. Perhaps, this is why I write inside the chaotic mode of the confessional. I need to score my hit, even now, still addicted.

When I was first diagnosed as terminal, I wondered if anyone else would desire me if my current relationship dissolved. We weren’t yet married and several people hat-tipped at my husband’s compassion for remaining beside me. After all, I was a woman condemned by her physical form, a body fated to be tubed to an oxygen tank, to wilt like a flower kept too long in a florist’s freezer.

I wanted to scream at them: What about my bravery for staying with one man when my years are numbered? Am I not the plucky heroine risking my precious time on him?

At our wedding, a then-friend proclaimed to the other guests that my husband and I loved each other like we were afraid, that we cowered in the delicacy of our love. Would you tell a disabled friend to her face, You love like an animal in a trap? I’m more concerned about men loving my sick body like that, as if it’s a snare of skin and responsibility for anyone except me. I can’t blame possible lovers for their trepidation. Many terrible things have happened and I am their creation, even after the therapy, and love, and learning how to present a steady mask of contentment.

Stable, as in I have studied how to manipulate the projected imagine.

::

I still worry about encountering certain men in Le Plateau’s streets. Desire is supposed to be an open-and-closed book. That optimism doesn’t seem to hold true, especially after the dying started. If I’m two drinks in or my day hasn’t gone to plan, I begin to feel infallible, like my life is a neatly written phrase. I’m not fumbling in my bag for a pen. I’m prepared for my narrative to end at any time.

Nothing can hurt me if I already know the grand finale. [So let me kiss all the lovers I could kiss, one last time, please?]

It’s a staggering way to feel, but when I’ve built a life on self-destruction, who can feign their surprise? It’s not that I’m not in love with my husband. I never want to hurt him. For me, inhabiting a dying body means I must extract the most living from my body as possible. Except I don’t have the luxury of fucking up. I can’t expend years on accruing mistakes and fixing them.

I imagine the exhilaration of doing one last bad thing.

I imagine the exhilaration of being allowed to do bad things.

I imagine what I would do and it’s sometimes exhilarating, and sometimes it’s depressing and I wonder if my life only exists in my mind. After the diagnosis, I worked to create a stable, functional life for myself with a loving partner and friends, one where I didn’t self-isolate or harm my body through food, purging, or cruel men. It’s not a place of ease for me. It’s a conscious, deliberate effort to maintain.

I want to read about the wild, nymphomaniac nihilism of staring down mortality as a young adult, but if these essays, poems, books, or social media posts exist, they elude me. Do the sick not want to confess this or am I alone in feeling this? Maybe I am alone. Another dying woman might be satiated by the quiet Sunday matinées of chocolatines and writing in bed. The unebbing presence in each other’s worlds. The familiar passion. Most days, these offerings are enough and I’m happy to love and be held by love.

Still, when a flicker of my younger self surfaces, I’m afraid. Afraid that I’m fated to forever be the girl compelled to starve off her every want and need. Not all damaged women live to see their redemptions. Will I stay enough years to see mine?

::

I would love to confess: I used to live like brushfire and I learned how to stop, how to keep my environment stable. I got better. I swear, I’m better now.

Of course, it’s easy to see where my feet stomped the ground a little too roughly, the soil I streaked through with gold paint. I’m sorry I’m like this. I wish I could show myself to you. Stand in the field, pointing towards my small remaining fire, and say, I made this and I’m not ashamed for having made it.

Here is the place I live within. If I didn’t choose it for myself, let me choose it now.

Lauren Turner is a disabled poet and essayist. Her debut collection, The Only Card in a Deck of Knives was published by Wolsak & Wynn in August 2020. She lives in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal on the unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Find her @sickpoettheory.

Image by Erwan Hesry @erwanhesry