“Would you still love me if I were a worm?” I am sick. I am afflicted, compelled by a streak of spite and cruelty, and, on occasion, I am found to be unattractive.

I think there is something wrong with my heart, my hands, my lymphatic drainage system, and my head. There is something wrong in my head. I can never be sure about what part of me is bad, and doctors offer no assurance. I do, however, hold little respect for medicine or the doctors who practice it. I sat beside premed students in biology lectures long enough to know that they would never know more than I do, or care any more than I could. 

I am forever superstitious about my body. There are days I swear I can hear the poison threading itself through my veins as I stifle the urge to pull at my skin and peel back the layer of the flesh that has been growing on top of my bones for decades. On other days I check my chest, my tongue and my eyes, just to verify that my demise wouldn’t arrive unexpectedly and interrupt my worrying. 

Of course, I still ask for second opinions, however, I quickly discovered that sharing my fear isn’t always met with understanding. Some misinterpret my apprehension for neuropathy, others, offer well-intentioned words of comfort. But, for most, it was just who I was. To my mother, I am not sick, just an evil wretched woman who was once her daughter. To the men I became acquainted with, I am a woman and that’s all they could prescribe to my existence. 

I swear to them all, that I should be dead by now. Perhaps this is God’s idea of a good joke, a prank he played bringing me into existence. Perhaps I was born with the pain imprinted onto me, or maybe I grew tired of swallowing the pain of my mother. But blaming my mother for my body’s shortcomings has grown tired and old. 

When I was eight, I forgot how to breathe. It had thrown me into a panic. I had asked my mother to stay with me, a plea for her tenderness. She told me that my worrying was selfish, I was far too young and healthy to think of death, everyone dies and I should worry more about her mortality than my own. It was this night I confronted death for the first time. I stared at my bright green walls and wished for them to be black, I wondered why a God would be so cruel to throw me into existence only to die, painfully or painlessly, it wouldn’t matter as then, I would cease to exist and wouldn’t have to recall his cruelty. 

This is also the night I doubted God. I had never grown up in a religious family, but at some point, I wish I had. I liked the idea of a heaven and prayers, like a fairy godmother but with more fine print. Sometimes I would pretend to pray, fake it until he believed me and granted my dog immortality. It never happened. My childhood dog died at 13 and a half.

My mortality became a haunting whisper in every silence . An uninvited guest that lingers in the back of my mind, prodding me to entertain them at all the wrong moments. Sometimes I stare at my reflection long enough and wonder if I could think away the fragile line that separates me from eternity, wondering if the weight of mortality is heavy enough to keep me alive. I’m tired of the hatred of my skin and counting the breaths until the next is accompanied by my last. I wish I could say I had grown resilient through my constant worry. 

I had every intention of being dead long ago. Waiting for moments to pass before I could say I lived enough. I never got there, and I fear I never will. I feel an obligation to tell you that I will not survive this lifetime, nor will you or anyone else who has ever loved me. A servant strung to the cross of the bitterness of the very thing that ties me to the rest of humanity, I want nothing now but survival.

I don’t know when I will die, but what I do know for certain is that I will either die loving you or missing you. An unfortunate circumstance, for which I blame you entirely.

Salvation is a work of fiction

A wall of ammonia, mildew and degreaser greeted me as I carefully stepped down a far-too-narrow staircase leading to the bathrooms of my tenth favourite dive-bar in the city. The stalls were graffiti-ed in a performative kind of way, the kind that screams “I care more about the world than you ever will” and makes you feel like an asshole who just wanted to take a piss. For the first time in half a decade, I greeted the bar toilet bowl on my knees, growing red and agitated with the hard linoleum, piss-covered floor beneath me by the second. I used to spend most Saturdays like this, every second Friday and Thursday like this, curled up on the filth of whatever floor I let myself land on that night.

Tonight, my posture was religious. I gripped the bowl like a pew, my mouth wide, screaming for a peace that would not arrive, at least not until two in the afternoon the next day.

Long before bar bathrooms and the soft-but-calculated machinery of modern self-improvement, there was the binary carved into us like an early scripture: the Virgin and the Vulva, Madonna and Whore.

And yet there I was, kneeling in a bathroom that smelled like it had never once witnessed repentance, only regret. What was I regretting in that moment? The tequila? The beer? My aging body? I settled on the final cigarette. And what did that make me in the old script of things? A whore? The virgin? 

We pretend salvation is found in detoxes after a pack of cigarettes and a shared gram of coke, in mood boards meant to disguise our lack of ambition, in trading our calories for martinis. The sacred and the profane circle each other inside a woman’s temper, 

The Virgin is praised for existing without choice. The Whore is condemned for the evidence of her life. Yet neither mythology accounts for the woman bent over a toilet, or walking past a mourning family at church while still sweating cranberry-flavoured vodka from the night before.

Even on the bathroom floor, I felt the faint, absurd awareness of performance, my hair falling a certain way, the way my eye’s turned a pretty shade of green when they watered, the way my lipstick had stained my lips. The thumbprint of the broken toilet rim marked the inside of my palm, and I finally laughed at the joke, the one that had taken me years to understand.

When I first met my boyfriend, I had the unromantic thought: I shaved my pussy clean for you.

• Just like my mother taught me to do. A ritual of subtraction dressed as cleanliness; erasing evidence of time, of maturity, of animal fact.

  At twelve, my mother booked my first eyebrow thread, at eighteen, I was given eight laser hair removal appointments where the cuticles of my pubic hairs were disintegrated from my flesh as I spread open naked, like a barely legal porno. 

  I don’t think I want to be a mother. The thought of being renamed, made smaller, terrifies me. Sometimes I dream of a child I cannot find, always moving from room to room. I wake with a kind of ache, the kind I imagine my mother carries too. Maybe it’s the same longing, just differently aged.

  For as long as I can remember I craved control. Control of what — I could never say exactly. Control of how people saw me, of my body, of the way my DNA arranged itself in inconvenient patterns. I could never control being loved, or being known. I was always adjacent to myself, seeing the world through a pair of unperscribed glass, watching the gestures that seemed to make other women legible. My body wore many faces: a perfectionist unraveling, the girl next door, the girl with a baker dream, the one who thought food trucks were permanent. I lived inside each persona, but, never at the same time.

  My body wore many faces: a perfectionist unraveling, the girl next door, the girl who wanted to be a baker, the one who thought food trucks were here to stay. I lived inside each, never at the same time.

  The sound of water on skin, the drag of a blade against the fallen hair thickened with revolt— it all became one sound. What began as hope turned to labour. There were days I plucked the stray hairs by hand, shaping womanhood through small violences. I told myself it was discipline, but it was fear in disguise.

  Today I stepped into the bathroom, steam collected on the mirror, the room unreadable. I hadn’t bought a razor in months; the one in my shower had rusted from neglect.

  I think of my mother. How she used to wash my back, how at some point she stopped. I can’t remember when. Perhaps when I stopped asking. Perhaps when she started naming me by what she feared most; fat, slut, ungrateful. Maybe those were the only words she knew for love. We became strangers not through distance, but through repetition. I promised her I was done being angry, that we could remain foreign to one another. It seemed like mercy then.

  I resented being my mother’s daughter—all acts of tenderness violated by the prying eyes of expectation and perfection. I think of all the time I spent shaving away time as the city bustled alive beneath me. Maybe today, I will return my mother’s call and ask her to scrub me clean again.