The creepiness of her flatmate’s nature was again evident, as he stuck a piece of paper with a number of pregnancy dos and don’ts, including his doubtful medical comments and encouragements. He was a saint in a living body (a lonely saint, a monk secluded in his cave of meditation), as he offered to lower the rent. That was also what his mother suggested when she moved in. She might have just as well lived there for free, as she was under the impression that they didn’t want the money from rent. The mother desperately needed someone to keep an eye on the landlord. She actually told this to him in a more or less humorous way.
‘I’m not disabled,’ he complained.
‘You never know’
She would say that staying in one room for years was some sort of disability, but she didn’t want to argue.
The next day she sent him another message. She was motivated by the fact that she was trying to put on her trousers but the button barely could reach the hole. This put her in a less charitable mood.
‘I would actually appreciate the lowering of the rent in case I needed new clothes.’
It didn’t pose any problems for him. He was kind enough to advise her to use some olive to make her skin more flexible. She knew that pregnant women got stretchmarks, but, apparently, he was an expert on every single pregnancy detail.
‘You’re weird,’ she wrote on a piece of paper.
‘Aren’t we all?’, he responded in his metaphorical way.
She wasn’t sure whether his sense of weirdness matched her sense of weirdness. Weird people wore socks from a different pair, they shaved their heads and tattooed their foreheads, they pierced their eyeballs or other atypical body parts. They ate chocolate donuts with bacon and hummus. They quit they job to travel around the world and sleep in hostels or yurts. Fine, staying for years in a room was another sort of weirdness. But didn’t weirdness have anything to do with individuality and freedom?
Was she weird for not wanting to be a mother? Was there something wrong with her for not fitting in this idea of a woman: a perfect housewife, a mother, a wife? Was her only presence on this planet limited to society’s expectations, years of tradition and her biological functions? Was she weird for considering other life options more attractive than caring for a human being?
Due to her pregnancy, she felt bloated and she farted a lot. At first, she was embarrassed at the thought that he probably heard everything. After a dosage of farts, she actually didn’t give a damn. She was like a farting machine and, if that made her any more human, she doubted whether humanity was such an exciting thing.
She didn’t need to be able to read and write to fart in such numbers. She didn’t need to be educated. Funny enough, reproduction was such a natural and pristine quality of a human being, that they didn’t really need any civilization at all. Getting pregnant was easy. Growing a baby inside her stomach was biological and she didn’t have much to do with it. And still, so many women had problems with fertility and couldn’t conceive a child. Did it make them any less human? Did it make them any less women, limiting their roles to being the incubators for healthy reproductive cells? Were women who miscarried any less worthy, or those whose child was stillborn, or disabled, or died just after the birth? Wasn’t that was civilization was for? Wasn’t it for accepting that we are more than the producers of people and some had different desires and dreams?
She hated him these days. He was happily masturbating to Selena Gomez’s head while she was a victim of her sex. She was pregnant, not him. She was to develop stretch marks, not him. She didn’t want to participate in this process at all. And he could only write silly pieces of advice on rolled papers he stuck in the keyhole, making himself the master of wisdom, and her: an obedient slave who didn’t know what to eat and how to take care of herself.
She was angry. She was annoyed at the loud music he was playing and she asked him to turn it down. And when he ignored her, she swore at him so badly, she was even surprised that she was capable of such a feisty amount of words.
