Once I Was Cool by Megan Stielstra

Author:Megan Stielstra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO010000, LCO002000, LCO019000
Publisher: Curbside Splendor Publishing
Published: 2014-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

FELT LIKE SOMETHING

MY OVARY IS THE SIZE of a cherry tomato.

A cell the size of a grain of rice grew into a tumor the size of a tangerine and sucked up my ovary. Like Pac-Man.

That’s how my doctor explained it: "Like Pac-Man." Later, on the operating table and under all sorts of anesthetic, I remember thinking, Pac-Man, hahaha, before passing out completely. When I came to, she told me the tumor could have killed me.

32 years old. 6-week-old baby. Dead by tangerine.

I am in awe of the power in little things. For example: a space nebula the size of a pin could crack a hole in our galaxy; my vote could change the direction of our entire country; the clitoris, when properly stimulated, can explode part of a woman’s brain; and a tumor the size of a tangerine made me believe.

In something.

I’m still trying to figure out what that means. Am I talking about God? If so, I’m painfully aware that this could be a scene from Eat Pray Love: white woman in her thirties has life-altering experience and runs off in search of The Divine. The thing is, I don’t know what the The Divine means. I left the church when I was a teenager because of politics, dated too many boys with dreadlocks to be comfortable with The Spirit, and, frankly… I’m busy. I have three jobs and a very active three-year-old. Nurturing a belief system is way too much of a time commitment. Problem is, you still need to call yourself something, so I’d just say Atheist and leave it at that.

When I was in high school, it was easy—a lifestyle choice, if you will. I was that especially ridiculous kind of geek who would cut class in order to go to the library. I’d read Nietzsche, Darwin, Dawkins, and all sorts of heady texts with titles like The God Delusion or The Case against Christianity. If you were stoned enough to get cornered by me at a party, I’d tell you all about the lead singer of Bad Religion getting a PhD in Zoology to “like, authenticate his lyrics”—seriously. You would have hated me. I hated me—but, at eighteen, don’t we all? For shits and giggles, think back to yourself at that age. Why were you like that? Why did you believe what you believed? Why did you do the crazy things you did?

When I was eighteen, I went to see a psychic. Not because I believed in that stuff—Atheist, remember? I didn’t believe in any stuff, but a girl who lived in my dorm asked me to go with her, and at the time I was so profoundly lonely that I’d have followed her to Siberia. This girl, I’ll call her Nancy, was a bit of a stereotype: Birkenstocks—check—gauzy skirts—check—homemade beads of Femo clay—check—in her dreadlocks—check check. Also, she owned a drum. With which she went “drumming.”

“I’m Nancy,” she said the day we met, both of us lugging suitcases down the hall, “but you can call me Persephone.

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