Piano for sale

Not haunted.

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I have the thumb drive with the footage from my surgery on it. It's sitting on our coffee table, a small blue slip, a nothing thing. I watch the surgery sometimes when I'm alone. The small room of my uterus, the meaty, alien fallopian tubes with fimbriae waving, the smooth pink muscle of my bladder, the ovaries ghostly and translucent and blue-tinted, a home I've lived in my whole life that I was never meant to see. 

I wish I could say it's beautiful, but to me it just looks strange, threatening. Like the inside of a butcher's shop, like the bottom of the sea. I can imagine for the first time what my carcass would look like, strung out on the ground, if I'd been drawn and quartered by an angry mob or felled by a wild animal. An old National Geographic special echoes in my mind. They always go for the liver first.

The uterus isn't an empty cavity, the way anatomical drawings always make it seem. Mine was blown up with air so the surgeon could venture inside it with a small camera, but normally it's collapsed, the walls pressing against each other. A potential space, as one of my old nursing textbooks put it.

What I remember most is the scar tissue cobwebbing between my organs, the way it fanned out when the surgeon drew an ovary up and away, the way that ovary swung wildly when the surgeon cut the last strand with a laser. Endometriosis, pretty severe, he said, speaking to my future self curled up on the couch with yellowing bruises on my belly, while my then-body laid there unhearing.

He lasered off patches of endometrial cells that had escaped my uterus, their ancestral home, and migrated where they were never meant to be- my bladder, my ovaries, my intestines. Once there, they bled, the only thing they knew how to do. A hundred small self-inflicted wounds inside the very middle of me. The scar tissue that built up over these mute, blind cells strangulated my ovaries, contorted my fallopian tubes and glued them to the organs behind them, cemented my uterus to my rectum. 

He lanced the endometriomas, swollen cysts on my ovaries filled with old blood that looked like nothing so much as melted chocolate, or coffee, dark and frothy. I watched them bubble forth, hunched over my laptop, and felt equal parts disgust and desire. 

Why did they leave? I wish I could ask the small rogue cells, these idiotic nomads. Where did you want to go? There is nowhere to escape here, just more of the dark, more of the meat of me. Go back. 

They were meant to help me have a baby, but instead they made it impossible. They were too good at their job, or incredibly bad at it, but either way, they tried to turn the whole world into their home and instead left us both mute and wandering.

Hopefully this makes a difference for you, the surgeon said to me on the recording, as he nestled one newly freed ovary closer to its original spot. Hopefully this makes all the difference. 

And then the recording ends. An alien landscape, somehow a home for me. Maybe not just me. Disgust, desire. Pain, potential space, opened, unhaunted.