koh lanta
This story begins the way it had to: on the gray November morning I learned I wouldn’t be able to have children, I overslept. Feet fumbling over the jagged, splintering floors in my Prospect Heights rental apartment. Watery espresso and skipped breakfast. Shoved into shoes. The lock pounds off the door as it slams behind me.
It's funny how memory carves fault lines around certain moments, encircling them like Pacific island chains. The waiting room in the fertility clinic in Midwood, full of beautiful Orthodox Jewish women in brandless white long sleeve shirts and shapeless navy skirts, husbands holding their hands. This place calls itself ‘Genesis’. It is neither cold nor warm. My idle fingers trace over the engraved logo on the metal clamp of a clipboard as I fill out paperwork, more aware of the dusty salmon walls and faded orange chairs than anything I am being asked. I can tell you anything about myself by heart. The couples speak to each other in low murmurs of Yiddish and Russian while I scroll through Instagram and see how far I can push back my cuticles before it starts to hurt. It didn’t occur to me that I might want someone here with me, but I do not know who I would have asked.
An intrauterine ultrasound is a strange, squishy sensation. The clear gel on the wand as it presses down on parts of my body I have never seen. The crinkling of the paper gown covering my bare legs. The technician explaining that they’re trying to discern how many follicles each ovary has. I watch the screen as the darker black air bubbles reveal themselves amidst the folds. We count together: one, two, three. Four, five, six. Seven. I ask what is ‘normal’ for someone my age. Reproductive medicine is an imperfect science, I am told. But what becomes clear to me is that my eggs are somewhere other than my body and no one can tell me what happened to them.
I am sent to the doctor’s office to discuss the state of my ovarian reserve. I have not been to a doctor who had their own permanent space since I saw a pediatrician, but the one I see that day has bookshelves and diplomas and photos of her family. I am a good candidate for cryopreservation, she reassures me, because I’m only twenty-five and so the eggs that I do have are younger and more likely to produce a healthy pregnancy. I do not tell her that I am three weeks away from aging out of my father’s City Employee health insurance that most certainly does not cover elective egg freezing. I do not tell her that I am seven weeks away from quitting my job and subletting my apartment and leaving New York to go backpacking around Southeast Asia, something I’ve been daydreaming of for years. I do not tell her that I am too young, too single, too reactive to have this conversation. Instead I agree to things that make me feel even more lost and scared and alone like having my blood drawn so that I can make sure I am not passing down any inherited diseases to my future children.
On the Manhattan-bound outdoor N train platform, I try to call my mom. She doesn’t pick up. The raised concrete jostles as Coney Island bound trains pass in the opposite direction. The subway roars and screeches and bing bongs in predictable, soothing patterns; I grew up close to an outdoor train station. I ride the train and read the Thailand Lonely Planet travel guide I checked out of the library until I arrive at my office. No one notices I took the morning off. I call my dad while crying hysterically in a felt phone booth marooned in the middle of our open floor plan and he has no idea what I’m trying to say. He asks me if I’m trying to get pregnant. The walls are a womb that is rough and gray and I stay inside for as long as I can.
The saying goes that grief is an island. To me, grief is an amniotic sac. I try to exist in the world I inhabited before, but I don’t. I am aged, immeasurably. I mourn the children I haven’t conceived of yet. I try to talk to friends who tell me that they don’t want kids, that I can just adopt, each set of words a breeze sending me further adrift. I can tell you everything about myself by heart except why trying to have children is so important to me. I roll around in my emotional bubble and try not to blame anyone for not having the words to comfort me yet.
I skip Thanksgiving with my parents and their impending divorce that year to spend time with my friends Chloe and Grace in England. We examine objects in a concept store in Islington and I confess that I’m considering canceling my trip to put the money towards a round of egg freezing. Aghast, my friends remind me that if I spend all the money I saved to freeze my eggs instead of traveling I will always resent my child for what I sacrificed to have them. They know me better than anyone and they are right.
It has been nearly five years since that day in November, and I am still fumbling around the unstable foundation of starting a family. I threw my problems to the wind and went to Southeast Asia. I came home and found a new job where people notice if and when I show up late to the office. Its health insurance covers freezing my eggs and I go to a clinic whose walls are millennial pink and everyone is there alone because they are ‘girlbosses’. I date a man who says he wants kids and who holds my hand when I wake up from my retrievals and who shuts me out of his life. His dad gets sick and my brother gets sick and one of us talks about it and the other does not. We break up and I am relieved that I didn’t ask him if we wanted to freeze embryos.
In my head, these five years, I lash out at everyone. I blame the doctors who can’t give me answers about why this happened. I blame the friends who I feel have it easy. I turn being lost and scared and alone into being bitter and hurt and resentful like a toxic alchemist. I let my worst thoughts take root like if I went through all this and somehow find someone who wants to start a family with me and we go through all the pain and money and time it takes to form a fetus and I still miscarry. What the fuck am I supposed to do then?
This story began how it had to. I didn’t write it. I may never. This story is ocean currents, salt water erosion, ships vanishing into misty horizons. This story is one I can tell you about myself, by heart.