Hopefully this is ok. I've spent most of day hand writing bits of it, though not all in one go so it may seem a bit bitty (and some bits have been moved around a little!). Hopefully my checking isn't too terrible because I'm not fab at it at the best of times - so at this hour it's probably gone completely to pot :D. This is a one shot :)
"Fine"
It's a word with so many uses. It slips in to so many sentences though it's often overused. How often have I heard, given even, the platitude of "you're fine" with patients who cannot seem to accept that there is little to nothing wrong with them. Sometimes the words work, they confirm that danger – whether real or imagined – has now passed. Sometimes they fail, the patient hears them as a hollow dismissal of their fears; of symptoms they attribute to themselves though they may not actually suffer with them. Patients like Colette who seek attention, seek care and comfort and concern. I have little time for such patients, whose who draw me away from those who actually require my medical expertise. Only in truth, that platitude is not the reality. Medical maybe it is but in other ways they are so very far from fine, but their need is not something I can fix. It is not in my skill set, my remit and so I use those empty words, the set standard to get myself away.
Fine
I don't just use it with patients. The word starts to lose all meaning on my lips when used in relation to myself. How many times have I used that word to answer the question 'how are you?' It is easier than stating the truth; a truth that really no-one one wants to hear, which explains why the lie is so readily accepted. It keeps thing simple. Only it doesn't, not really. The truth stays hidden, slowly eating away at you, destroying and tormenting you. How many patients have I left feeling that way telling them they're fine until they use the word themselves in answer to the question – because they have taken me at my word?
Fine
It is a loaded word despite its hollow truth. It is a way of ending arguments and conversations, when really they need to continue. When there are more words that need to be spoken but you are scared to speak them; to free them from where they fester in the darkness that is your mind. The lie is easy; it comes as naturally as breathing; perhaps even more so for sometimes the act of drawing breath is much more complication, it requires a physical effort because you have paused, frozen in time. Only you don't realise you are forgetting to breath until someone reminds you, or the circling blackness in your mind comes to a peak and you force yourself to gulp in air to prevent a collapse.
The truth is harder. It requires much more effort; the giving of a part of yourself to another and having the trust in them to do so. I have trusted so few that the concept of doing so is alien. To let someone in to my head would give them power, a knowledge in to the parts of me I try to keep hidden; to let them in to a place in to which even I am scared to tread.
That's the reality of it. If I say I'm fine; repeat it like a mantra until it practically loses all meaning, maybe then I will believe it to be true – that I am fine. Yet it doesn't seem to work, or hasn't so far. How long have I used the lie? Throughout my adult life for certain but if I am honest it has been for so much longer.
I'm fine. Words whispered as a child, a preteen when abandoned by a previously distant mother. The physical abandonment to complete her neglect of me, I speak the words to those around me, to push them away. I need to be strong, to prove that I can do this; that I am independent. The only one I can rely on is me and so I have to be fine. Those people who try to make me talk, to discuss how I feel about my situation; the abandonment, I cannot talk to them. They won't believe what I say, will use it as an excuse to give me a label. I don't need labelling, never did – because I can give a hollow lie and make it sound convincing. But still they label me – difficult, evasive, cold. But those things are probably true. A mother who couldn't love me, who left me. What could that mean other than the fact there is something wrong with me, with the fundamental aspects of my being, but it doesn't matter, none of it matters because when asked I am fine.
I am fine. Words stated when that mother returns. I am an adult, a grown up, no longer a scared child trying to fight to be old beyond her years. I am fine that she abandons me again, because what more could I expect from her, a woman like that. The one who made me this way, cold and hard; the one who made me fine in my early years. It is fine that she has raised the girl who is my half sister, when she couldn't raise me, left me as a child to fend for myself. She has not ruined that girl as she has ruined me, she has given her something that I never had, a stability of a home life and presumably love. I imagine she loves her, or at least shows her affection. It confirms what I have known my whole life, that the problem was me and not her. That I am good only for spare parts, those parts of me that must be undamaged enough for somebody else's use. The rest of me though; has caused this. But it doesn't matter, because I am here now and I am fine.
It is fine that I am alone, that no gold band sits on my left ring finger telling the world that I am somebody's wife, that I am loved by a man who has chosen to wed me. Men try to change me in to the woman they desire, and not that woman I am. They want to perfect bride who will stand in a princess gown of white at the alter, hidden demurely by a veil, who will live a life with them baking cupcakes in the kitchen and having meals on the table ready for when he arrives home. They want the woman who births his babies and stays home to raise them. Men are creatures who I understand and yet fail to know. There was Joseph, probably the closest I came to that life, to giving up the parts of me I use as my façade; to keep up the image of being fine. I loved him, and thought he loved me – believe it even now. I trusted him enough to talk but still he left like the others knowing I couldn't follow. He broke me and yet still I had to be fine, to whisper those words. I had to be fine to carry on, because I couldn't lose. I couldn't walk away with him because of what I would lose, yet the break in me could have cost me it anyway. So I had to be fine once more.
It is fine that I thought that I couldn't have children. Why would I want a screaming child to wake me at all hours, to treat me like a cow – a producer of milk – at it's very demand, to pull me from the job I love while I take leave to care for it when I have worked so hard to get to this point. It's being would stretch my waistline and steal the control I have fought for in my life. It is fine because what child would want a mother like me, cold and unfeeling, scared to confront the things in her head. A mother who could turn out like her own and abandon the child when it needs her, returning only when she needs something from it. It is fine because I am not maternal, not one to dream of happy families and all they entail. And yet really it wasn't fine, pretending that all was normal, that nothing had changed, that nothing inside of me was slowly dying, a dream, a feeling I had forgotten, tried to ignore because the time was never right, I had a career to think of, no man, the wrong man, it was too soon – a never ending list of reasons why not and a bitter truth that the true reason was me and not those other things. But it didn't matter, because I was fine.
I was fine when test results came back negative because it was for the best, even though my heart sank at the lack of a second pink line, the word not pregnant dancing in front of me. It was fine because that was the answer I deserved to see and yet still I had thought, perhaps, it could work, that maybe it would be alright, good even. I had tried to sound like I wasn't disappointed when I told him the result, stating it was negative and pretending that was fine. Like everything it was fine.
It is fine too then that now I am pregnant, that in spite of everything I have conceived a child. My mind having compiled a list of why it is a good thing that I cannot have children when now I have an embryo growing within in, taking nutrients from my body, causing me to weary much more easily and to eat so much more freely. It is taking away the control I have over myself and my body. And I say that this is fine. Pretend I am absolutely fine with it, because what else should I be? The terror I feel, that I will damage and destroy this innocent being simply because of who I am is something to be pushed away, and ignored outside of my mind tortured mind because those thoughts are not normal or expected, they will earn me another label probably lead me to having to talk all the more. So I pretend that I am fine with all of this, though to some I am denying it more than I am accepting. I make the changes, do as my body wants yet I do not speak of it openly. It is the fear of having to break when it is destroyed, of them knowing then that I cannot be fine but pretending once more that I am. I can do this, I can cope alone because it is who I am. I am fine, always, I am fine.
And that is the thing, even with this being, I am alone. It has a father, something which I never had but it doesn't really. Not in the way that most would like, and I have to be fine with that too. I have to pretend I am fine with the state of our relationship when slowly it has destroyed me. He came close to melting the ice within me, to being trusted enough to hear the secrets of my mind and then my own fears had pushed him away. Because I wasn't fine, and he was close to seeing that, close enough to me that he may have tried pushing past my lie. He was more determined, maybe cared more, enough to see through the lies I tell even to myself. But I couldn't bring myself to trust him, not when I didn't trust him not to leave once he knew the truth; of the physical damage and scars which could prevent the future he dreamed off to go with the emotional ones with which he may not have coped. Why would he want a damaged, complicated woman like me? And so I pushed him before he walked, stripped him of all the he holds, to make him feel like nothing before me because in truth that was how I felt. I needed power, control and the only way to regain that was to destroy him in that moment – and when I did so, when he walked away and I lost everything once more I had to once again be fine. To hold my head high, and to act like everything was as it should be. To pretend once more that everything is fine.
Everything is fine. I am fine. The eternal lie. Only it is getting harder to tell. Each time the truth presses down on me, a weight on my wearied shoulders. The being within me, perhaps, making it all the more difficult.
I hear a voice and am drawn away from my own head, and come to realise that still I am seated in the locker room. I cannot remember quite what brought me here, or why I am sitting on the bench, nor why he is sitting here with me. I can see his face, studying mine, painted with concern. I look down to see my hands in his and that too confuses me, I don't remember him taking hold of them nor why I have not pulled them away for his hold is not tight.
"D'you want to try that again" he speaks like an actor on a film set, asking for another take of a scene he felt didn't quite go as he wants, and I do not understand what has brought us to this point or what we need to try again. My mind is swirling, the word fine shimmering and dancing, a taunt, a reminder. He can see something in my face, reads it like no other. He gives my hands a gentle squeeze, before he raises one to my cheek cups it for a second before I realise he is wiping away a tear I do not remember shedding, "How are you?" he asks the question and I remember him asking it earlier when he had settled beside me, our shift having ended and I'd found myself sitting on the bench not quite able to move though no reason for it other than the bone aching tiredness.
I look at his face, open and kind before me. Eyes searching mine, trying to draw from their very depths and truth I cannot bring myself to speak. He knows, knows the lie and seems unwilling to accept it. Instead he holds me in my place with his eyes, waiting. He'll wait until I am ready, and that I fear, may be a lifetime. And yet I feel the bubbling of words in my throat, boxes opening in my mind that I've tried to force shut.
"F" I start to say the word, start it but am unable to finish. One of his hands still rests on mine, one held against my cheek. Our colleagues are either long gone or working, here we won't be disturbed for some time. I try to form the words that slip on to my tongue but they freeze behind the lie that rests on my lips.
In a movement swift, so swift I barely notice he draws me against him. My body falls against his, and he holds me. Whispers words in to my hair that he understands, that I don't need to speak. The tears well and fall against him, and I am grateful he cannot see them though I know he can feel them through his clothing. He holds me with no expectation of where this will lead, only knowing that in this moment I need him because despite the word on my lips I am far from fine – and yet in this moment rested against him – his body warm and strong – I feel it. I feel safe, and secure. I turn my head against him, feeling the rise and fall of his chest, beneath my ear I can imagine the steady rhythmic beat of his heart. I start to talk in to the fabric of his top, words that may not reach his ears though I feel his hold tighten. His body being strong for mine. I speak against him until the words run dry once more, my story barely told but enough for now. Enough for him to now the truth, that in spite of what I say, the image I present, I am not and have never simply been fine.