19

07:14:00

He might have, actually, been a little bit mentally disturbed, as he stuck in the keyhole a list of things she should avoid eating. Whatever you call it: over-protectiveness or mollycoddling, or possibly a serious mental dysfunction. It wasn’t even his baby. They weren’t even friends. She doubted whether in these circumstances he could have ever had sex. On the other hand, he could just as well call for a prostitute and have the service at his place. That was disgusting. You rarely heard about men’s prostitutes healing women’s pains. She had sex for fun and consolation and now she was pregnant with an unwelcomed occupant of her organism. He could order a woman online and no one would judge him. He might be called a stud, she would be called a whore.

He didn’t order services online, though. He was probably watching porn or looking at the pictures of leg-spread women with attached heads of actresses and singers. Ranging from Sharon Stone to Selena Gomez, to cater for all tastes. He must have been doing this a lot.

Imagining him masturbating in front of the computer screen didn’t bring her any pleasure either, especially when she was vomiting to the open bowl of the toilet closet. When she ate something, she threw it up. When she didn’t eat anything, she was just throwing up water. She lost weight and she felt terrible. Pregnancy might have been a blessed state, but whether you wanted it or not, she felt more or less as content as when undergoing the gastric flu. And it didn’t end after three days. It seemed to last forever.

She was so bloody hormonal that she cried for days, watching TV and listening to music to make her cries unheard. She didn’t want anyone to know that she was pregnant so she deleted her Facebook profile in advance. She wanted to skip protruding belly photos and silly get-together pictures with peers. She wanted to keep this a secret from her family and the circle of friends, including her ex, including his new girlfriend, including even the father of her child, who might be lurking somewhere from their mutual pictures.

She became an outcast limited to a growing embryo, her rented room and her masturbating, mentally ill roommate. And this overwhelming thought that she didn’t want, and never had wanted, to be a mother was hanging over her head like a cloud of hail.

She remembered herself as a child. She was always unhappy under the supervision of her parents, always moody and stubborn. She never played with baby dolls, never pushed the stroller, never cared about the little ones who were playing around. She wasn’t interested in her younger cousins, in their little affairs and problems. She had never been motherly in front of anyone. At times she did something bad, like painting the walls with her school paints, throwing cocoa powder all over the kitchen floor and pouring water into her mother’s shoes. She was possessed by outbursts of hysteria and dissatisfaction when her parents quarreled with her and she couldn’t get what she wanted. She wondered how they dealt with her since even a thought of dealing with someone of similar character was for her unbearable. She was awful as a teenager. Always unhappy. She compared herself to other girls who were more attractive and more fortunate with their well-off parents, nice clothes, and silly boyfriends. Frustrated, she sometimes disappeared for a night or two and her parents had no idea where she went.

When she was an adult, she came to her sensed. She studied hard, she didn’t cause trouble. And the last thing she wanted from life was a moody, naughty, talking-back child. The fact that she wasn’t married didn’t bother her. The idea of having a family was for her something abstract and ill-suited. She was happy in a one-to-one relationship. She just wasn’t happy as a potential caretaker of a human being.
And while she was throwing up, and crying interchangeably, she was reminded of one more thing. She never felt anything when she saw a child. If there was any instinct, she wasn’t the one to feel it. She was immune to the pictures of little, cute, helpless children, she never had any desire to hold them, groom them or take care of them. She was rather disgusted at their stinky nappies and their smiling toothless faces. And now this face was growing in her womb, making her feel terrible and forcing her to vomit.