Endometriosis

Content Warning: Medical trauma and gore

There is a blood trail behind me, smeary across the hardwood floor, streaked across the cement, and staining the pale tile. Dark clots cling to rock or dirt or pavement wherever I go. When I move, the threads of the beast pull taut in my core, the pressure molding my organs against the monster, every step weighed down by the effort it takes to carry it with me. When I curl my body around my husband in our bed, my fingers twined in his, the beast slides up beneath the sheets and yanks me back to my belly, pressing from me the last shred of peace in a body that no longer feels like mine.

My mask is soaked with tears and snot, and I peer across the stirrups affixed to the exam table. The paper cover beneath me crinkles and sticks to my thighs which are filmed with cold sweat. The doctor on the rolling stool says my monster is the same pesky vermin that half the world carries. But my creature looms over me, eating the light and casting me in shadow. It enrages me that this doctor cannot see it. 

Months go by and the beast grows. I have never known the lines of my ribs, but now I trace them while I lie in the dark. At my brother’s wedding, old friends mistake my burden for something beautiful. They gaze at the hollow of my collarbone and tell me I am gorgeous. With heels on my feet, the monster’s tendrils pull tighter, taking my breath and vining clean flesh with raw wounds that grow and thicken into filaments of scar tissue, knitting my organs together. At the reception I can dance only a little as our blood trail stretches out behind us. My monster’s ropey pale limbs bulge through my skin from the inside. 

Each month the monster shifts, and my wounds open fresh, and the scars overlap and thread deeper into my body. Time passes and when I look in the mirror I see the beast in the dark circles under my eyes and in my pain-pinched brow. In the air around me, my creature creates a vacuum that swallows my voice before it can leave my throat. 

So I focus my days on finding laughs so hearty they break free of the void. I spend hours in pursuit of grand and sweeping stories that take me places my monster can’t go. Most of all, I keep close the people who look at me and broaden their shoulders before taking a protective step between me and my monster, if only for a moment. Especially my mother, who glares at the beast’s every vivid detail, thrusts her sword into the air, and bellows in its face. And my husband, who stares down the demon every waking moment of every day and far into the depths of night, never fleeing even when he grows tired and the beast grows so large our home shakes on its foundations. And my boss, who combines his abundant laughter with my own, sending my monster slinking away into dark crevices.

One humid August day, a doctor puts me to sleep and works hours to pry my body from the monster’s grasp. By the time I wake, my burden has a name. There is power in knowing the true name of a demon. For a time, the beast diminishes. But the monster is me and I am the monster, and while one lives so does the other. But, I gain power and strength from my pain. I keep turning my face to the sunlight, and I keep seeking stories and laughter and I surround myself with those who see the beast I carry and walk with me anyway, even if it means blood on their shoes.