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she could feel herself splitting in two.

the one half of her insisted, loudly, primally, "IT'S ONLY PAIN DON'T STOP KEEP GOING KEEP BREATHING PUSH PUSH PUSH IT WILL HAPPEN IT WILL HAPPEN DON'T STOP"

while the other could only scream and scream.

scream, and think about splitting, about all the parts of her that were seperating from her raging body. she, as a child who wanted to be a princess and also got skinned elbows -- that girl had been torn from inside her. and she, last summer, unafraid and lithe and flushed with the secret of her body's life; she rushed out and away in currents of her blood like a ship borne on the sea. she, in her imagined future before all this pain and tearing, breathing the spiced air of india and burying her feet in medditeranean sand -- that dream was being ripped from her heart and cast distantly, irretreivably, into oblivion.

amid the pain and the blood and the heat and the sweating and her own screaming, her thoughts kept returning to the part of her that wouldn't be torn away, no matter how hard she'd tried in the past months while she swelled and ached. that was the part that loved him, loved him as deeply has he'd fucked her that night in the garden, her back pressed to the young grass. she thought she might seperate from that self when he left, just days after the garden. she thought that part of her might have been pulled from her throat when she cried into the toilet the first day she vomited. and, in these moments of terror and agony and her own splitting -- she thought that what she was feeling was her love for him finally being torn away.

she thought this, endlessly, but could not speak it. she could only scream, and breathe, and wait for the death she felt would come if she kept seperating from herself, over and over again.

"one more push!" she dimly heard someone call to her, and her primal half obeyed, and out from behind the sheet soaked with her blood and her past and her future emerged the most beautiful part of herself she'd ever seen, seperated at last from her body and her womb, but now hers in a way that she could have never imagined. seperated, but bound. and binding all of her other selves together."emily," she said.

and the moment she named her, she saw all that was torn from her stitched together.

we can never leave ourselves.