YARDSTICK
Tags: Abortion, Memory, Memoir, Creative Non Fiction, Theory

It’s only the sounds and sights, the smells and feelings of the moment, that tie us to the present. The present is nothing if not the projection of the past and the echo of the future.

Kota sits on the floor in front of me, panting from the playing we’ve been doing. He loves his new toy: a stuffed reindeer that grunts when he punches his nose into it. The squeaker is stubborn, you really need to put your chest into it, or your nose, whatever the case may be. He cries when it doesn’t cooperate.

My sister and I teach him a new command. “Make squeak” means to push his nose so far into whatever toy he’s nearest to until the air in the little balloon releases in a scream. He hasn’t mastered it yet, but we’ll get there. He can already go pee on command, as well as the standard sit, lay down, roll over, and shake a paw that every dog knows. I read somewhere that Pavlov probably thinks about feeding his dogs every time he hears a bell ring.

Memory, the core of soul, the piece that distinguishes me from you and you from everyone else, is what constitutes a life. The call and response when I say, “make squeak” and my dog punches his rubber toy with this wet nose reflects the gravity of recollection. All I have to do is repetitively pinch the toy myself, while saying the command, to teach him the connection between them. He hears me, I hear him, we reflect each other by listening.

I, at my kitchen table, hearing the hum of the fridge and the cats padding around on their tiny paws and their delicate meows made to imitate a baby’s cry and my own fingers typing on the keyboard, hurriedly hitting the backspace for every spelling error or missed piece of punctuation, am creating this moment as it currently is. And no matter of typing or writing will create the moment for my reader. Memory only exists to the one who experiences it, regardless of how they write it.

I wrote a lot of one-liners in high school. Plenty of them stuck with me, but one that comes to mind now says, “I’m not a writer, I just don’t want to forget.” Is there a way to preserve a moment in words, in marks on a paper; is there a way to remember the way we used to be organically and without judgement?

I try to write as honestly as I can. 2019 was the year I made it out of a terrible relationship. I still haven’t written about it, except to say that I learned some things are not meant to be pressed in prose, on the last night of the year, holed up in a bar with my new boyfriend, drinking too much whiskey.

At work a couple days ago, I told my supervisor I was going out for a smoke, so I could call my doctor in privacy. My doctor filed for a blood work requisition, and I wanted to make my appointment. Kayla, one of my coworkers, was sitting in the smoking tent puffing on her vape.

“How you doin’, pretty lady?” she asked.

The wind blew the vinyl tent against its metal structure. I heard the crinkle of the coil in her vape as she took another pull. My hands shook.

“Trying to get ahold of my doctor and see if I’m pregnant.” I laughed humourlessly.

Her eyes widened. “Oooh, shit. Yeah, call the doctor.”

I hoped she’d leave soon so I could call alone.

“They’re not that bad, you know, abortions?” she said. “I’ve had one.”

“Yeah? Does it hurt?”

“Oh, it does. Definitely does. But they’ve got you so hopped up on drugs that you don’t even know it hurts, if you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-one.”

“Okay, yeah I was your age when I had mine. It was a year ago.”

“Do they let you bring someone in with you?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, you have to bring someone. You can’t drive yourself home, right? I mean, they give you the option of how many drugs you want, like you can go for nothing at all, you can just do one, or you can do two. I did two because why not?”

“True.”

“But yeah, you have to bring someone, and it’s super dramatic. They take you in a separate room and are like, ‘Did this man assault you?’ and when you say no, they give him a speech about how to take care of you after.”

“Who did you bring?”

“I brought the guy who got me pregnant.”

I laughed. “Good guy.”

“Yeah… not really. I pretty much grabbed him by the balls and said, ‘You don’t have a choice.’”

I curled my lip.

“They ask if you want to know if it’s twins.” She giggled. “I was like, ‘What difference does it make?’ What are they expecting me to say, you know, ‘Okay, well I’m okay with killing one baby, but I draw the line at two’? Nah, I’m going for the package deal. Two birds, one stone.”

“’I knew I couldn’t handle one baby, but I can definitely handle two,’ right? That’s the way it works?” I said.

“Exactly. Anyways, yeah, they drug you up and stick the little vacuum up in there, and boom, you’re baby-free.”

And there’s “nothing [left] to say about these well-known facts other than their consequences” (Lefebvre 44). Was this moment meant to pressed in prose? It was never a moment “isolate[d] in [the] present” (45). It could never be protected from the connotations of the past or the consequences of the future. Each moment elaborates on the yardstick fashioned to measure the space between ourselves and the rest of the world. Each moment finds itself “central” (46) to who I am, as a point of reference I can return to forever until I die, and “periphery” (46) to everything else that has ever happened to me.

“Seen from the Window.” Rhythmanalysis Space, Time and Everyday Life, by Henri Lefebvre, Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 2017, pp. 37–46.