Sunday Scribblings

I just discovered Sunday Scribblings, again through paisley's blog (thank you, paisley!). The rules are simple: a writing prompt is published around Saturday, and bloggers can write whatever the prompt triggers.

This week's prompt is a phrase: "I get that sinking feeling..."

The Awakening

Though I've tried I've fallen
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know

Fallen, Sarah McLachlan

I was twenty-one when I got my first boyfriend, six months after my dad passed away. He was younger than me, but I was a virgin in every sense of the word. We both liked to write. I thought we had everything in common back then. Time proved differently.

We met at the little plaza in front of the University clock tower during summer school. We had actually been introduced once before, by a mutual friend, but I had forgotten him on the spot. He remembered me. I was sitting on a bench burning letters I had written to my best friend and unrequited crush. Yes, I have always had a flair for the dramatic.

Some time later he came to me and said he had dreamed about me. In a matter-of-fact tone I asked "what did you have, a wet dream?" I thought I was so witty.

He wrote me letters when he went back to his town for two weeks at the end of summer school. Only they were not really letters, nor were they short stories. It was hybrid text. I was riveted.

I saw him again the first day of the Fall semester. I flat out told him to ask me out for coffee. He was broke, so I ended up asking him out. And so it was spun, this web that held us both for nine years.

The day I lost my virginity I sat on the toilet at the motel and cried.
When I had my first orgasm I laughed uncontrollably.

When Operation Desert Storm came about, there was talk of resurrecting the draft. I was terrified. He said he would escape to Canada before going to war. I crossed my fingers and hoped it did not come to that.

When I told my mom I had a boyfriend, she sat down in our old rocking chair, and cried with her face buried in her hands. She said that now that I had someone I was going to leave her and she had nothing else to live for.

Three months after we started dating, I threw up one night. The next day I had horrible nausea all day. A test confirmed what I knew. I remember opening the envelope with the results while silently repeting the mantra "please let it be negative, please let it be negative." It wasn't. In an instant my world came to a crashing halt. The fairy tale was over.

So what comes next? That was the question. We were both sitting in the car, outside the lab where I had gone for the blood test. In my mind there was no doubt. I could not, would not. He wanted to help me, be with me, show his love and support. He paid for it, with money from his tuition assistance. He took me to the place, called Women's Medical Pavillion. He waited outside for me.

I walked into the place as if in a daze. I glided through the hallways, listening to the nurses, but not quite hearing what they were saying. I remember a plethora of nurses. I don't remember a doctor. I don't remember much, actually. Everything is pretty vague, the stuff of dreams. I was hooked up to what can only be described as a human vacuum cleaner. There was a clear plastic hose, or maybe some kind of clear container. Whatever it was, it turned red when they suctioned off what was inside me. Sometimes I still replay that image in my mind, the sudden explosion of red that signaled my descent into the kingdom of Hades.