At Sea

I am sitting in a drab, pale blue colored room. Surrounded by sad, solemn faces. All waiting, like me, to end one life and resume another. I’ve forced myself to go numb inside. If I let one emotion trickle in, it would turn into a waterfall or tidal wave and drown me in my sadness, regret, anger...

It’s raining outside. Normally I like the rain, the way it clings to trees, grass, windshields, making the world sparkle and gleam like Christmas and then when it’s gone the world is left a little cleaner, the air a little fresher. But today, it’s suffocating. Water running down windows is washing me away. Every drop of rain is filling my lungs. Every blue-gray puddle I pass reminds me of death.
On the way in, an innocent looking girl standing under the shelter of a huge black umbrella gave me a judgmental stare and a pamphlet. It was a last minute attempt to change my mind. A last ditch effort to have me reconsider the choice I was about to make, as if I hadn’t already considered both sides. As if, I hadn’t visited every website, read every article, made a thousand pro-con lists.
I really wanted to tell the girl that I was on her side once upon a time and that this isn’t really me. The woman in front of her is all an illusion, a series of misguided decisions, influenced by insanity and loneliness.
* * *
Throughout all of my high school years, I’d looked forward to going away to school. My mom had always told me that people were more accepting in college. You could be different and still fit in. Guys were different too, she’d said. I’d like college. Silly me, I believed her, like when I was little and I’d believed her when she said that if I peed in the pool, it’d turn green. It was never really true, just a lie to get what she wanted. She wanted me to go to college.
My dorm was located in the University City district of Philadelphia. Towers Residence Hall at Drexel University. It was a gray concrete fourteen-story building, located conveniently across from a 7-11 and a row of brownstone houses. From my window seat I could see a small park, complete with beach volleyball courts and an AstroTurf soccer field. It all seemed so perfect, so picturesque.
When I toured the colleges, I had quickly decided Drexel was the school for me because it was so full of life. The campus was in the heart of Philly; there was even a subway stop across from the library. Even during the summer, students milled around, carrying shopping bags and talking animatedly about parties they’d gone to and concerts they’d seen. With so many different people on campus, it seemed unlikely that I wouldn’t be able to find friends.
School started in late September and it appeared as though all of my fellow freshman had already been there for years. They all had huge groups of friends; all of their days were filled with plans and their nights with parties. I didn’t know then that these so-called relationships were superficial and very few would remain consistent beyond the first few months of freshman year, and so I wanted to be a part of them.
I was never what you could consider popular in high school, a source of much anguish, but nonetheless I had managed to find a solid group of friends to hang out with. When I moved to Philly, from the suburban sprawl that is Long Island, I expected to quickly have some semblance of a social life. I was shocked when this didn’t immediately occur.
My first weekend at Drexel, I sat on my bed, reading and listening to music, as my floor-mates primped and pre-gamed, yelling up and down the hallways:
“Yo, Sara! Can I borrow a black bra?”
“Sure, if you wanna give up some alcohol.”
“Ugh, fine! What party are you going to anyway?”
“Ummm that frat house on Powelton? You know, the big one with the lawn?”
“Oh, yea! Sounds fun, I heard those guys are really hot. Maybe we’ll stop by.”
I don’t know why I didn’t have the confidence to go up to one of their open doors and see if I could join in the fun. Instead I just sat on my bed, listening to their progressively slurred screaming, until all were gone and the halls were quiet again.
Three weeks into the year, and I still had no one, no real friends. My family was hours away and everyone from back home went to school miles and they were occupied with their own lives. I couldn’t help but feel like the whole world was moving forward, and I was barely treading water.
* * *
I am in a room adorned with various posters, some touting the benefits of contraception and others depicting diagrams of proper condom application, all messages that most of us have sadly missed or forgotten. I look at the girls huddled around me. Most are young. Some have brought moral support. Others are alone, like me, desperately trying to hide the mistakes of the past. Some are crying and others are stoic. They too have built up that internal dam.
I look down at the pamphlet. A smiling, happy baby stares back up at me. Flipping through the pages, it seems as though they’ve found a collection of the world’s cutest, bounciest, well-behaved infants and toddlers, all of them looking up with bright and eager eyes, pleading for their lives with the women they know will be reluctantly reading.
“I don’t know if I can do this.” I say meekly to the girl sitting next to me as the guilt further cements itself in the pit of my stomach. She turns to face my direction, her big, brown, tear-filled eyes never quite meeting mine. She can’t be more than sixteen.
“What else are you going to do?” She replies, as one single tear breaks free from her eye.
* * *
I was never actually alone. I had a roommate, Christina, who promptly began to drive me insane with her incessant talking. The sound of her fake nails clacking away on her keyboard late into the night, became more like nails on a chalkboard, slowly but surely eating away at my sanity as I tried to fall asleep. She was always in the room. When I woke up in the morning, she was still in bed, farting in her sleep, and remained there until after I left. When I came back from classes in the afternoon, there she was. One day when I walked into the room, she was sitting on the ground painting dots in various shades of gray on pieces of paper strewn about the carpet.
“Oh my god Liz, you won’t believe this assignment I have for my design class. It’s crazy, I have to make 50 different shades of gray and arrange them in order from dark to light. Isn’t that so weird? I mean, when I’m an interior designer, what is this going to do for me?” Of course I’d get stuck with someone who wanted to be an interior designer.
As I looked at her side of the room, with its overly coordinated sheet and comforter sets in various animal prints, and her walls adorned with Dali posters, that she thought were artsy, and I just saw as pretentious, I couldn’t help but pity the poor souls that were duped into hiring her.
“Yea, that is pretty strange.” I responded with disdain.
She continued talking, despite the fact that I wasn’t listening. After a few weeks I’d developed the uncanny ability to block her out. It wasn’t until I heard another voice that I started paying attention. I looked at the door to see a short, round, Hobbit-like girl with disheveled brown hair talking at me.
“Liz. Heyyy Liz!” It was Rene, the only person in Philadelphia that I could remotely consider a friend. She was perpetually stoned and left the scent of weed behind her whenever she walked away. I could smell her from my bed, at the opposite side of the room.
“Liz, you wanna hang out with some of these guys I met?” She asked me.
“Oooh, guys?! Can I come?” Christina squealed obnoxiously.
“No.” Rene was as irritated by her as I was.

“So how do you know these guys?” I asked on the walk over to their building, the honors suites on the opposite side of campus.
“Oh, well this one guy, Chris, is in my AVF class and I ate lunch with him and his friends, and they’re all really cool.”
I didn’t care if they were cool, they could’ve been the biggest assholes in Pennsylvania and I’d probably hang out with them, just as long as I had plans and could get away from Christina.
We walked into their suite and were bombarded with the mixed scent of sweat, stale beer and cologne. A group of five guys turned away from a red cup covered table, the only furniture they’d bothered to purchase, and looked at us.
“Hey! You’re just in time for beer pong ladies!” Said a tall guy standing at the head of the table. Judging from the empty cans strewn about the floor, they’d already been drinking for some time.
“You! Hey, you,” Another tall kid with long curly black hair and piercing green eyes called to me. “Be on my team. I need all the help I can get over here. I’m Jeff, by the way.”
“Uh, sure,” I responded. “I’ve never really played before though.”
“That’s cool. Those two are completely gone anyway,” he said, pointing to our opponents, both of whom had that glazed-over look in their eyes. “So what’s your name?”
“Oh, yea. I’m Liz.”
“Ok Liz, so basically you have to get this ball,” he said, holding up a white ping-pong ball, “Into the cups over there on their side. Easy enough, right? Go for it.”
I threw the ball and missed the cups and table completely, and the ball went flying down the hall of their suite.
“So that probably wasn’t good, huh?”
“No, not really, but whatever you’re a beginner. It’s all in the wrist, kind of like basketball, you know? The wrist flick is what makes the shot. Watch me.” He threw the ball and it gracefully arched into the front cup. “See, that was easy right. Now they have to drink the beer in that cup cause I got it in.”
As the game progressed fewer of our cups remained, and my shots were getting no better.
“I see you haven’t really mastered it yet. Let me help you.” He said, putting his arm around me, the way people on TV or in movies do, when some guy is teaching a girl to play golf or pool, it’s all really just a ploy to achieve physical contact. I never thought those things would happen to me, so I missed the obvious move. Together we threw the ball, his arm guiding mine, and it landed perfectly in a cup.
“See! Awesome!” He gave me a wry smile and put his arm around my waist.
After a several games, most of which were lost due to my utter inability to make a shot, I was significantly drunk.
The first few shots that I actually made were accompanied by platonic high fives, but as the night wore on and got blurrier and blurrier, these high fives progressed to celebratory hugs, then seemingly innocent kisses on the cheek, and finally, after our first and only win, an excited kiss on the mouth. Apparently Jeff had morphed from a benevolent teacher to an instructor with ulterior motives and everyone had noticed but me.
* * *
“Elizabeth Austin?” A nurse dressed in head to toe white, with long blonde hair and pale, almost translucent skin, calls from a door leading to the back. I stand up and walk nervously over to her. My stomach is twisted into knots, my hands are shaking and my legs don’t want to support the rest of my body. My heart is pounding like when you’re riding waves at the beach and one takes you by surprise and you can’t tell which way is up and you think you might never find the surface, that you might never breathe again. My lungs want to explode.
“How are you today Miss Austin?” Her name tag says Mary. She takes my hand and leads me back to an exam room. She starts explaining what’s going to happen, how I’ll feel after the procedure. The doctor comes in and gets me ready. Their mouths are moving but I’m too lost in my own thoughts to listen. Everything is like a horrible dream and I keep trying to wake up, hoping I’ll be back at home, in my bed with the sun shining in through a big, open window and my dog is laying next to me waiting for me to get up and play. I keep trying and trying but I won’t wake up.
* * *
Before I even really knew what was happening, Jeff was taking my hand and we were stumbling down the blurred hallway to his room. It felt like I’d slept with my contacts in; nothing was in focus and my eyes felt heavy. My feet didn’t make it off the floor with every step.
“Let’s watch a movie. I’m not tired.” Had I been in the right state of mind, I would’ve recognized the deeper guy-world meaning behind “watch a movie.” I would’ve known that ‘watch a movie” was yet another ploy for physical contact. It was just a cheap method to get girls into their rooms and ultimately their beds.
“Ok! I’m not tired either.” I chirped. I didn’t want this night to end. And in my drunken fog, this was a way to prolong it forever.
He put on Orange County, as I climbed my way into his lofted bed. Twenty minutes of Colin Hanks and we were sloppily making out. His breath tasted like beer and peanuts, but I didn’t care. I was finally getting the attention I’d wanted, but had been denied, since coming to Drexel. This was my mom’s prophecy about guys in college being fulfilled. Nothing was going to stop it, not even the quiet utterance of “I don’t have any, you know, protection.”

He didn’t call me the next day, or the day after. A week. A month. It’s not like I had expected a relationship. Even as it was happening, I had on some level known that it was a one-night stand. I had never done that before. I’d always been the kind of girl that needed a relationship. My last boyfriend and I had dated for three months before I’d even made out with him.

I had pretty much known the moment it happened or at least the morning after that something within me had changed. I once read a story about a girl who woke up one day and was in labor, she hadn’t even known she was pregnant. That girl had to have been completely out of touch with her own body because before the missed periods, before the strip turned pink, I knew. I knew because I could feel it- a strong attachment, an almost animalistic instinct to protect something, but what? I knew.
And that was it. That was the shitty moment in life everyone experiences; where they’re forced to grow up, despite all self-preservationist instincts to stay young forever. Life tried to prepare me. It sent me curve balls and important decisions to make, but I just let other people handle it all, and now? Now I was screwed. Now I was forced to grow up in a second, go from 18 to 35 in less than a minute.
And that’s how I wound up where I am. That is the sordid, sad and regretful tale that brought me here: The Planned Parenthood Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center on Chestnut, just five blocks from school.
“If it was a boy, I would name it Thomas,” I say blankly to Mary, the nurse, “and if it was a girl, Melissa.” One tear escapes me, and the dam is broken. Every emotion I have been holding in comes flooding out in a torrent of hysterical crying as the doctor injects a sedative. I try to fight off the drowsiness, but despite my best efforts, the white light of the room slowly fades away and everything turns to black. My thoughts are silent, the guilt is momentarily gone, for the first time in months, if for only a second, the waters are calm, the sun is shining and I can finally just float.