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GARY J. SHIPLEY <
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/TAG/GARY-J-SHIPLEY/>
Primaternity
I have headaches that expand into the world and make the
people around me ill. They don’t know it yet, but my
neighbours are all slowly dying of me.
July 20, 2020 <
https://web.archive.org/web/20200721012948/https://harshlit.rip/2
020/07/20/primaternity/>
I
hear things like this and all the joy is gone. I don’t even want to
breathe anymore, not if it’s to hear more things like this. Feels like
a state-controlled programme conceived to make me cut my throat
already. And if I was more paranoid, less resilient, not pre-soaked in
despair since before I could remember, then maybe my habits would be
different. Maybe I wouldn’t be glancing into mirrors expecting to see
someone else. Maybe I wouldn’t be quite so immune to the
misdirection of my self-loathing. Maybe the days wouldn’t be this
horrible liquid, crawling uphill with no sense of where it came
from.
I’m buried next to myself. It’s the way I compare a rule to what
instantiates it. I’ve been reborn so many times I’m my only surviving
blood relative – and it’s not as if I even know if it’s possible to exist
anymore. I had thoughts yesterday no mother could absolve. They
rolled around in my head all day like prisoners on the floor of the
Bridgewater State Hospital. I have headaches that expand into the
world and make the people around me ill. They don’t know it yet, but
my neighbours are all slowly dying of me. I used to have pets until the
brain cancers got them one by one. I’d say I find it hard to live if I
knew what that meant.
It was a list and there were pictures: pygmy marmosets, tarsier, titi,
squirrel, saki and capuchin monkeys. I’d read the shopping list of
favoured species before I thought to look away. And there were
pictures of their short-haired, foetal bodies, and those o-so-darling
oversized nocturnal eyes. I wondered: where they were going, was there
anything they could see? Was it possible for light to reach inside as far
as that? And then, squeamish either way, found I had no impetus to
know.
How they were adapted to fit made me want to weep. The tails, which
can be twice as long or more as the rest of the monkey, were the first
to be removed. And then every tooth and then every nail. And then the
anaesthetic wore off, and no eyes were built for what it left. My fellowfeeling for these tiny beings touched me like I was any kind of man or
woman who felt things for other things as if I were them – an
extension of my self-interest, if you will. And this apparition of me
nontransparent for once, and so much less the vacuole I’d come to
unknow. I saw it moving and caring and following me about, dark and
vaporous and leech-like, a more tangible version of whatever I was
whenever I thought that way.
Post-natal depression attracted the wrong kind of friends. It happens.
They sat round in circles drinking coffee and tea and cannibalizing
each other’s traumas. Their gossip was a feverish collaboration, each
one pretending to be further from recovery than the one before. The
terrible thing about the violation of their being-without-child was how
habitual it had become. Some of them pretended to be more
insignificant than they were, which was the most difficult thing they’d
ever done – and the most significant. They regarded sex without babies
as a violent simulation. They compared it to bulimia: the more they had
the emptier they became. With the help of inertia and deep-fried food,
most became too ugly even to masturbate. They exposed themselves in
too many chatrooms at once, came away with the feeling that no one
cared, not like they did on TV, where people got paid to behave like the
real thing.
In case you didn’t know, for some women the being pregnant part is
precisely where it’s at: the material promise of it, the feel of a life
moving inside them, all of it unsurpassable. There’s nothing comes
close to growing your own painkillers. And don’t creators always make
the best destroyers?
The most pregnant of the bunch smoked a dozen cigarettes an hour
and had no sense yet of how this regulated her schizophrenia. She had
visions of daily routines (work, husband, house) and heard voices when
people spoke. They all swilled anti-rejection meds by the handful. In
addition to their bumps there were the angular protrusions of the
contraptions required to sustain these cul-de-sac pregnancies: the
feeding, waste and breathing tubes, the devices into which they were
inserted, that removed or supplemented as required.
Those who still engaged in vaginal intercourse said how their more
impressively endowed partners sometimes complained of a pinching
sensation at their most deeply inserted region. But mild discomfort is
no consolation, not for evil this far gone – and I should know. You
can’t ameliorate laboratory-grade cruelty with a well-directed taunt.
And what is trolling their subreddit with pictures of intact monkeys
plucking fruit from the branches of trees but paper clothes on a suicide
risk in a room full of nooses? What are monkeys in wombs anyway but
listening to your favourite song over and over until you fall asleep?
I guess I’m manufacturing one cause célèbre to disguise another. Truth
is, it takes a pretend forest to obscure a real tree. But as luck would
have it, pretend forests are easy: I grow them in a day.
///