He told me last week that we couldn't be happy until we knew. Last month he told me that we couldn't be happy until we knew, but that was a different thing. I told him three days ago that I knew that when we knew, we'd find something else to make us tentative and scared and on a fucking precipice.

My whole life in these past couple of years has been on the edge of knowing. And I have come to the conclusion that all knowledge can break you.

And lately, I've been seeking that knowledge alone. Everything from the physical things to the meta of the same. Today, I walk past the abortion clinic a block from my house to the drugstore a block further. A woman in a lazy straw hat pushes at me a large poster board bearing a picture of a fetus and some words on it. The words are blurry. I'm not crying, but something shades my sight. It's this bothersome determination, my quest for this knowledge. He is at work. I am alone.

I throw my purchase on the counter, and the clerk makes a low "Oh"ing sound. I've dreaded this from her, but am surprised that she does it. Somewhere I thought that Payless clerks had no souls. They were like those animals that are in your dreams, you know the ones. They're in Far Side comics a lot, wolves and monsters with neither pupil nor iris. Just white. Cloudy white. And you could buy three boxes of condoms, a can of whipped cream and a 10 foot tarp and they wouldn't flinch, they'd just ask for your money and make your change with stalwart unshaking hands. And so I expected this 50-some year old woman with the Brooklyn accent and the French Manicure to be at least slightly neutral, if not sensitive. Somewhere I'd ranked her in confidence, like a psychologist or a clinic doctor. I'd put that trust in her. So yes. I am surprised.

I walk past the abortion clinic again. I don't want to look at the woman and weigh my chances of being hit by a car for not looking in her direction to check for one. I decide to risk it, and as I walk across the street, I can feel her looking at me. She's decided that her message is hitting home although I hadn't looked. She thinks about my past. She steals my reminiscence. She sees me in high school, and knows that my boyfriend pressured me then to rid my body of its product. She laments my generation.

I never had a boyfriend in high school.

I'm one of those women that is mortified when she must buy feminine products at the store. I usually walk around the store, once or twice, figuring that there's something else I can buy to pad the bill, put something else on the printed receipt. I don't feel that now, partly because I'll wager that fewer women love their participation in menstruation than those that love their participation in the population. And when it came to this part of my body, my mother taught me well. Taught me that if at no other time, that things having to do with that part of me should be kept a secret, should make me nervous and quiet and subdued.

So he told me we'd be happy when we knew. He's always telling me that. He told me that we'd be happy when we knew whether we'd been accepted for our apartment. Who the fuck is he kidding? If we found out we couldn't, he would not have been happy. There's no doubt about that. And there's no doubt he'd be a little askew if I found out differently than we hoped on this ordeal.

Somewhere, I hate that. But somewhere, it's endearing.

These things are ridiculous. I mean, truly and all of a sudden mortifyingly ridiculous. Even if I am alone. Perhaps they're more mortifying because I am humiliated that I have to do this. My black kitten cocks his head at me curiously and I blush, I fucking blush, I blush my mother's blush and shut the bathroom door.

Five minutes later I'm calling him to tell him he can be happy, truly happy. Not the kind of happy that can come with the knowledge, but the kind that comes with the answer he wants to hear.

I hang up the phone. I curl up into a fetal position on the couch, cry for twenty minutes, and get up to throw the urine-soaked stick away. One line. I smile wearily at the little printed package insertion that tells me I can call registered nurses weekdays from eight a.m. until eight-thirty in the evening.

It's Saturday.

Kristin Colyar is 20 years old, lives in Seattle, and is in the throes of recovering from a writer's block, and impending projects keep her busy. Her personal choice is to funnel passion into words.

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