Mind over Matter

Mind over Matter

I am perched on the lion's tongue, it's roaring and roaring and roaring and there's nothing I can do to make it stop. I am running out of time, the seed is yet to be planted. Soon it's going to swallow me. I might possibly taste appealing for a fleeting second of my journey down, sweet maybe? Probably sour. But when I'm gone, I'm gone. That's it, my life diminished by a power greater than myself. That power being: inevitability. It's inevitable that I will die; it is inevitable that my life will never be completely fulfilled because I will never have a baby of my own. I can have someone else's, but it will never be my own. It will never resemble me; it will never have an abnormally small nose, always competing with the large face that surrounds it. But the baby will resemble the Handmaid and my husband. The seed may have my husband's narcissistic manner-although I profusely hope not. It may inherit the Handmaid's slight wrinkle at the top of her nose; the wrinkle is very prominent now, as she lies beneath me, looking equally as uncomfortable as I feel. Although I can almost wholly guarantee my telescope is far more blurred than hers. Never will it have my hatred towards rice or my tendency to read the end of the book before the beginning-well that was when I was able to read, of course.

I think of this as I scrunch my face distastefully at the noises the Handmaid and my husband are making, an attempt to seclude myself. I do not want to be here. I am fooling myself that the harder I delve my nails into her flesh, the quicker this torture will be over. She deserves to feel physically the pain I am enduring mentally. I make love to my husband and only I, this is simply her duty, nothing more and so far she's even failing at that. The light bulb has gone out. What is a light bulb without a fuse? A glass casing. A glass casing incapable of fulfilling its duties until it has a fuse. The light is the essence of the bulb, without it, it is nothing. Worthless. I wonder if the Handmaid has noticed the light? How can something so abhorrent blossom something so beautiful? Witnessing this is unbearable, but my desire for a baby over rides this, without ever looking back.

They moan. It has ended. They detach themselves.

"Get up and get out" I tell her.

I am desperate. I am in a tunnel, a tunnel with the promise of light at the end but which I am yet to find. Please God show me the light? I need reason. Hoping isn't enough for me anymore, I need a baby. I need something to cherish and adore, the way I wish to be cherished and adored. Being a woman means nothing more than to reproduce, we are inferior. We are paper, we can be written on, shaped or moulded, recycled or thrown away, but we can never decide our own fate.

As I watch her, stroll