Keeping It That Way

I’m not a nice woman. So, if you’re looking for one of those “nice woman awakenings”, an insight over the dishes or perhaps in that second she notices her infant’s toe peek through the hole of its white knitted sock… some soft thing that makes a sad woman think, “No stop! Don’t do it…” Well, don’t read on.

Oh, so you’re okay with that? Shame on you, but I like you. Are you ready?

See, I’m pretending you are someone else, Anthony. Someone who can read this. Someone, whose eyes can open.

What an awful photograph they found you with. Not even a head shot. I’d had my hair done. Had applied Revlon All-Day Foundation. And all you saw was the future in my belly. A future you would not be part of.

No, I won’t stop!

See, you haven’t left, not really. I still hear your answer to my every waking thought. We knew each other so well we didn’t even bother to argue by then. I’d think- you fecker, you never did the dishes after all the trouble I went to cooking your favourite Balti…but I knew that you would say, it’s only a few plates I’ll do them in the morning, and that then I’d say- if it’s only a few plates…why don’t you bloody well wash them now?…
but what’s the point in saying all that, when I knew how it would all end up?

Sometimes, there’s just no point in talking. The therapist, (the henna should’ve warned us) wanted to mull through all that shit with a stick. Get to the bottom of our feelings. There was only one grand finale to that kind of cut your heart open session, wasn’t there? We reached it at 29 weeks. The cruelty. You were tired of me. I didn’t love you. No, not a nice woman. I loved nothing by then. Except this thing, this thing growing, that hadn’t yet heard a bad word from either of us.

And what can I say? I wanted to keep it that way, keep it that way.

Photographer: Ewa Samples
Prose Author: Niamh Boyce