DIANA´S NARRATIVE

It was a sunny afternoon

It was a sunny afternoon

It was a sunny afternoon, typical of a December afternoon in a country of the southern America tropics. Despite the beautiful color emanating from flowers and summer air, Eliza's heart was in great uncertainty. Two weeks had passed and her period had not been pronounced. "I’d be so scary if I'm pregnant, " she said, looking at the big mirror in front of her, which for some reason made her abdomen look bigger than normal. –"but if only 10 days have passed since my period has not come", Eliza was encouraged by ignoring that intuition speaking to her. The same intuition that on her birthday, for some mysterious reason had told her that she was going to get pregnant, but that she was unaware of the lack of her tangibility. Whenever she tried to believe in her intuition, things went wrong, so that she had decided to put aside this ancient feminine sense. Determined to do so, she went to the first drugstore she found and bought a pregnancy test, shaking her hands gives the money to the cashier and doesn't even realize she forgot her change because of overthinking about the "what if....”. When she was 10 steps from home, she remembers she did not get her money back and with an uneasy passivity she returns to the shop in order to ask for her change, it's like she didn't want to get tested, as if something stopped her from meeting a decision-making truth. The cashier with an almost hidden laugh, delivers the change.

On her way back home, she observes how that December sunshine gives her a touch of bravery to achieve what would become an almost unenforceable task: going to the bathroom and taking that rejected test. And her mind still resonates with the phrase "what if...". With her heart in her hand and sweating because of her nerves, she pulls the test out of a plastic bag and blames herself for not carrying a briefcase so she wouldn`t have asked the cashier for a prickly plastic bag; on her longed-for  attempts to be someone different in this world she tried to be as less polluting as possible. Her mind returns to the purpose of sitting there, on a white and now cold toilet, she was covered by a sea of nerves knowing that her life could change in a second. She uncovered the box and pulled out the tools that would now be used as a kind of oracle, which would tell her fate, if a red line appears into a plastic bar after having put some yellow fluid in this. That oracle that had not been wrong almost 9 years ago.

She began eagerly to see how the inside of this stick was colored and recalled: -If I see two lines it is positive, if I see one it is negative- All her revolutionary ideas about abortion began to come to her mind as she saw the test stain coming up. "Free and safe abortion" she read on one of the banners she once held on a march at her college, as if she were in a lucid dream,  she recalled with pain and disgust the time that, in a dark, smelly room, she had to lie on an old wooden table with a plastic tablecloth on it that wore  an old and used pineapple print. From her belly, a woman without the slightest hygienic attire, rather than a pair of surgical gloves, with a homemade suction cup had sucked out an eight-week being that was coming into the world. She just should not have passed this moment if an abortion was not clandestine in her country. “What unfairness and sadness” whispers Eliza.

Eliza remembered almost 9 years later that she had to evade the fate predicted by that oracle at the time and felt pain and nostalgia for not having had the courage to carry out a pregnancy in her teens. On the other hand, she thought this may have been the best decision she made, because at the time she did not have a way to bring to life a being who innocently came to this world, she was just crossing the age of 18 and starting her university, her grandmother, who had been that woman who called bastards to the children of couples who didn't marry, would never  forgive her "What would have happened to me  getting pregnant with a man who didn't love me either? and what about  that beloved  speech on selflove, determinism, that taught us about our bodies and decisions ownership?

On the other side of an overwhelming silence, she began to dream of the presence of an angel materialized in her belly. The sensation on her body like sown land made her feel powerful, but again fear was attacking. "I will not be able to stand so much responsibility, I want to travel…"  words resounded throughout her mind- as she watched the second line of the oracle light up palely. She broke the test and started crying. The denial phase came and she thought that test was broken. She couldn't be pregnant, she kept repeating herself over and over again.

searching for answers, she called her first friend, Carol, who was a hippie in love with life and good vibes despite disgust and the injustices of the earth; Carol told her how beautiful and wise Eliza would look like with  the light that would come into the world if Eliza ever decided to have this baby. Unconvinced and rather desolated, she calls Lucy, who was going through the hardest moment of her life, the love of her eternity was dying of cancer, and 10 years ago Christine, her best friend because of a lupus strewn in her vital organs, had died in the delivery room after the birth of a firstborn who would never know his mother. With the sadness that evokes her friend's wisdom, she replies to Eliza: " I think you'd regret it more if you hadn’t given birth than if you had”. Lucy had always seemed to her a very wise woman, Lucy as a lover of good literature and crochet, had always guided her in difficult decisions. On the other hand, she thought of Lucy as a long-suffering woman who had gotten some wisdom that can only be obtained from pain. Unsure of what to do, she called Alejandra; with the confidence that an unhappy mother can have, she said she should not have a kid. This world was all rot. Alejandra would give Eliza all necessary to get rid of her “problem”. She hangs up, closes her eyes and gives herself to life. Having made a decision, call her couple.

 While getting ready to travel around the world, Eliza evokes the mystery of existence that is reflected in Alice’s eyes, a beautiful healthy girl who had come into this world after nine moons and the best decision Eliza has made. It was a sunny afternoon in one of those countries around the Tropic of Capricorn.