The black ooze

I never told anybody this, not my mother or my husband or my best friend. I thought they would say I was mad, but I believed it. I believed I was poisoned. 

It started maybe six months after you left. I missed a period but knew I wasn't pregnant. I went to my doctor and he felt my stomach and tested my urine. I told him that I was worried that I was damaged. Internally. He asked why I would be, had there been some trauma? A rape, an attack? I shook my head "no". He didn't ask any more questions, perhaps he knew that it was all in my head. Perhaps he looked at my notes, at the scripts for Valium and Prozac and he thought that I was more trouble than I was worth. He sent me for a scan.

I imagined a black ooze, like tar or treacle, collected around my fallopian tubes and my ovaries. If pressed to describe what it was, I think I would have reasoned that it was your semen inside me, years of it gone bad. I knew that this wasn't possible, and yet still the image in my head persisted, that I had been left with some of you inside me and that it had gone rotten. Pressing the wand of the ultrasound against my skin all that the doctor could see on the screen was plump, young ovaries discharging month by month my unneeded eggs. I was discharged from Gynaecology with a clean bill of health, but still pelvic pain persisted that there was never any medical cause for.

Perhaps a year later I became convinced that I had the HPV virus and herpes to boot. You had concealed herpes from me for a long time, but just before we stopped sleeping together you told me that you had it. Month after month I would try and ignore the itching and stinging, until it finally became too much to bear and I saw my GP. Thrush was diagnosed, no evidence of any STD. Any illnesses that you had transmitted to me were mental and not physical.

I fell in love and the images of tar in my womb began to fade. 

Then, some time before I turned thirty I tried and failed for six miserable months to get pregnant and that's when the images came back, in the night this time. I would dream of a baby swimming in the treacle of my womb, too dark to see anything or hear my voice. You had been gone for years but would not leave me alone, you were still inside me, rotting me. I told my husband about the dreams, about the fear that I would never have a baby because of what you had done to me. He stroked my hair and kissed me and that month finally there was something else inside of me besides you.