This is an extremely intimate diary entry regarding the events leading up to my cheating in 2023. It details the beginning of IVF, up until I signed up on an infidelity site. It depicts emotional neglect, body dysphoria, probably some suicidal ideation. I’ve told the story a few times, but because it is so intertwined with my identity as a mother, I feel I cannot tell it enough. I don’t know how to distinguish between these events, my identity and my ability to be a mother. Typing this as a sequence is a step towards integrating it as a representation, outside of myself, to be analyzed, and reframed. It is paywalled for security purposes.
On the shore, sat in the gray sand, I notice shiny pieces of garbage strewn across the coastline. Squinting my eyes, I tell myself the garbage is alive. They’re starfish, eels, lobsters, crabs. Only they haven’t been born yet. They need to incubate in a sterile landscape. I’m watching something new fertilize in the labor of slow planetary decay. Then, I remember, it’s me who is living. I’m the waste, I’m the burden and I’m on my vacation. I imagine a gun pointed at my head, threatening me with death, ordering me to be happy. “Be happy, or I’ll pull the trigger.” My husband is in the water and he calls out to me. He invites me in. When I look at him, I spot a few aluminum cans swaying along beside him. They glitter in the sunlight, brighter than the water, and I want to wish on them the way I wish on satellites. I’ll wish for everything because I know, on a manmade artifact, my wishes won’t be recognized. On those aluminum cans, which I pretend are satellites, which I pretend are stars, I wish for true, everlasting love.
This is the problem with my going outside.
My husband is smiling and cheerful.
I’m downcast and brooding.
My husband is neutral, rational, down to earth, and practical.
I’m excessive, emotional, imaginative, and theatrical.
When I stand up in the sand and head towards him, a group of people run past me. I smell their hair products and perfume lingering in the air. They’re all giggling together when they jump into the water. The water looks gross. Like dirty pool water, but a huge vast ocean of it. I want to believe the salt cleans it. I want to believe technology cleans it. I want to believe extermination is purity. The pollution is cleaning the rot, through chemical sterilization, and which, well, isn’t life the disease?
In the distance, I count twelve ships, each pouring their exhaust into the sea. I can’t tell my husband how I feel or what I think. I’ve tried before, and they were upset with me. Always too much, too serious, too depressing, too anything. Once I went out to clean the litter around my neighborhood, and I got so many patronizing comments and stares, I haven’t had the courage to go out there and do it again. From that I learned: don’t do more than what’s expected. Do things the way they have always been done. Do nothing. Surely, it’s someone else’s job.
Walking into the water, I see more tiny pieces of garbage. They’re all so colorful, like the remains of a party. When I look down and try to count the pieces, I notice more and more. Hard pieces of broken toys and broken containers buried in the sand. All this plastic makes me feel sterilized and barren. I start feeling it’s uncanny there are no animals here. Only a few seagulls near the parking. I’m really so sad, but I know it won’t matter. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, does, or feels. Either they’re happy, and they’re ruining my misery. Either they’re sad, but for the wrong reasons. Either they’re angry, but for a stupid purpose Either they’re in love, and it’s unhealthy.
I’m not going to say anything to my husband about the way the garbage is making me feel. He is having a good time, just like I should be having. Behaving. Comply. The ocean water smells like diesel. The airplanes overhead zoom by. The barges bellow. The people open plastic bags, smoke cigarettes, sip from cans, lather on sunscreen, spray perfume. The car doors bang shut. The motorcycles leave big, long plumes of black exhaust. Who am I to think it’s wrong? Everyone’s having so much fun. I’m ungrateful. I’m jealous because I’m not wearing a bikini. If my boobs were bigger, certainly, I’d be happier. I think about the garbage because that’s what recognizes me. I see the garbage the way I see myself: invisible, inert, silent, yet omnipresent, and enduring despite everything, maybe even, in fact, enduring in spite of everything. I’m not going to speak up and ruin everyone’s fun, or make my husband feel as bad as me, or make him as feel small and as helpless. What can anyone do anyway? We’re on vacation. We’re here precisely not to care about anything.
The sterility of the ocean shore reminds me of the hormones I will begin taking when we return home. Because my husband is sterile, and I want to have a baby with him. But I’m writing this from the future, and the version of myself in this story — I cannot reach. I don’t know her. I only remember her misery. I don’t remember the love she felt, or why should would volunteer for such a thing. But she did, so I’m here, writing backwards, to absolve her, to condemn myself. Typing to justify something ahead.
When I arrive in the ocean next to him, I don’t say anything. I smile, but he knows something’s wrong, and he resents me for it. He hates my bad acting, hates the fact I can’t lie and keep silent. He hates me because I can’t just be happy, hates me because they stopped doing lobotomies and he has to suffer for it.
I try to hide it. The aluminum can floating nearby. Rotting. I try to shut up. I try to think about the sun, or think about what he’s thinking, but I want to cry into this sterilizing, diesel soaked water, which bubbles with foam and looks like watery vomit.
Some authors can write a long story, full of details, and make you feel to be living there with them — in the hotel, in the parking lot, in the car, on the highway. When I write, it’s to get it over with. The faster the better. The sooner the better. I want the story done by the time I start it.