Barbie. Everyone’s favorite (or favorite-to-loathe) doll-slash-role model-slash-best friend-slash-impossible ideal-slash-icon of cultural demise. Even though I’ve always harbored a fairly incurious attitude toward the Barbie-as-perfection phenomenon, I nevertheless loved playing with my inanimate, buxom, rubbery friends. I didn’t compare myself to them, and they didn’t dictate my self worth. They were just one population in an only child’s universe of dessert-scented dolls, bathtub mermaids, and little plastic people who lived in a furnished tree.

Putting myself back together was a boring, organized process. A 1,000-piece puzzle left on the coffee table for months, or in this case, years. Finally sitting down to frame myself in sky and earth. Painstakingly searching the jumble for all those matching hooks and crevices. After the chaos of him, simply paying the bills on time was a cathartic experience. Routine was my remedy. Work away the day Monday through Friday. Come home when it’s dark. Stop at Walgreens to purchase a bottle of wine and pizza rolls. Cigarettes if needed. Home to one-and-a-half glasses of wine and the allowance of one orgasmic cigarette. The order was important.

At the age of fifteen, during the second semester of my sophomore year in high school, I cut off my hair—as close as I could to the roots—and started wearing my brother’s clothes. I wasn’t trying to be a boy; I was trying to un-girl myself.

“Have you traveled to China recently?”

No. I’ve been home, sleeping and battling morning sickness, except it’s at its worst in the evening, the way it was when my mom was pregnant with me. She’s sure the baby is a girl.

I’m standing at the edge of a small, rocky precipice, deep in the heart of the Washington Cascades. Fear courses through me like a vise, squeezing so tight it takes my breath. Crusted with ice, the yawning gap stares up at me with cold contempt, challenging me to leap.

“Pain. Today I learned what that word really means...”

My first period is documented in my childhood journal when on July 3, 1998 I became a woman. I was just a month shy of turning fourteen and about to embark on my freshman year of high school.

I contemplated flinging the ring over the railing into the woods, but then I thought: no, then it will be down there. The diamond will be shining in the dirt like the highlight on an eye in a painting, watching me. It will bother me that it’s still close by.

I grab my keys and check my purse before heading out. It’s not a huge trip, but these days, it seems like a huge trip—a visit to the grocery store. For a little over a year now, this trip has required some extra preparation. The old usuals: cell phone—check...wallet—check...coupons—check. And the new usuals: mask—check...extra mask—check...hand sanitizer and wipes—check... gloves—check.

As soon as I started to pull off my sweater, stretching the thin black vee-neck up and over my head, it suddenly occurred to me. I needed to remove one or both of my masks. I’d dutifully fastened the blue paper surgical mask around my ears, covered by a black cotton one, while sitting in the parking lot.

My first love was a 2003 Subaru Outback. We first met at the car dealership that’s notorious for ripping people off, where I was blinded by newly gained teenage independence. Excited by my accomplishment of saving up three summers worth of paychecks, I was easily seduced by the Subaru's dependable reputation. I was in awe at the fact that my dad wasn’t entirely disapproving.

The preheated oven warms the living room. The eighteen-year-old tape deck plays the Mughal-e-Azam soundtrack in the background. Caramel bubbles over the stovetop as I scramble through the pantry to find pecans for the pecan buns. This is a typical Saturday morning in my household.

Once, I had lunch with a really great poet. He said to me that most people think of anxiety the wrong way. They think that it is a rain cloud of what if, what if, what if, a cage of doubt and indecision which holds its sufferers in constant purgatory. They think of anxiety as a door flung wide open, flooding the mind with cumbersome uncertainty. In reality, though, there is nothing uncertain about anxiety. In fact, it is the most extreme form of certainty that can exist in the brain. Anxiety doesn’t ask “What if terrible things happen?” but instead says, “Terrible things are going to happen. What are you going to do about it?”

Genesis. Humpty Dumpty. Harry Potter. The tale begins with a rupture: the exile from Eden, the irreparable fracture, the lightning-shaped scar. A jagged seam from which the story spills. 

The first chicken bus honked at four AM.

The second one blasted its horn at 4:20 a.m., or maybe 4:30. It didn’t matter. I was awake well before dawn, like every day in San Andreas Osuna, Guatemala. I wondered why I didn’t hear the other 30 people sleeping at the Finca — surely one of the twenty three Guatemalan Army personnel and seven Engineers Without Borders staff heard the blast horns designed to wake all possible passengers in a twenty give mile radius. I weighed what to do in the darkness before breakfast at six and chose to shuffle off to the shared toilet ahead of any others. 

It’s that same feeling. When you’re a few weeks newly pregnant and no one knows but you. The grocery store aisles are spent dreaming of new life with a baby while you scooch past the crowding carts whose temporary owners probably have their own secret story happening.