2022 WATTYS SHORTLISTED || After being forced into a marriage by her devoutly religious parents, Aspen's husband is diagnosed with a life-limiting illness, and she must find her purpose as well as fight feelings for her husband's nurse. || Aspen Wat...
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It's funny how things never turn out the way you expect them to. Growing up, I always expected my life to turn out the way my parents wanted it to; get a degree, get a job, find a man ('never a woman, Aspen, unless you want to end up in eternal hell.') and get married, have children, grow old and find your way to heaven. If there is such a thing, of course.
I never imagined turning into a teenager and despising the way my parents lived or thinking they were wrong. Rebelling the way I was brought up was never something I expected to want to do. I also never expected to meet a man and want to rebel with him, either. I never expected to be twenty years old and listen to a diagnosis that could change our lives in three words.
Joel's sleeping in his hospital bed, so I take the chance to stare at him: his long, dark eyelashes that make people think he's wearing eyeliner, the dark stubble that's growing into a beard, the way he looks pained even in his sleep...
It's so hard to think of this as the same man who took me hand-in-hand to the abortion clinic two years ago, who held me when we were waiting, and told me no one was judging me despite the whispers following me in my head. I remember sitting in that room alone because Joel wasn't allowed in, and the nurse passed me the two tablets. She told me two tablets and it'll be a bad period, and it would be as if it never happened. But even as I picked them up, I couldn't do it. When I ran out of that clinic like Usain Bolt, Joel just held me and told me we would work it out. I remember enveloping myself in his jacket while he smoothed down my hair and told me whatever I chose would be fine and we'd face whatever my family threw at me together.
The thing I remember most are the bland, cream walls of the clinic adorned with pink and yellow posters about contraception and women's choices, I even remember one specifically about domestic abuse. I remember the walls were closing in, the sin, sin, sin of my mother's silent chanting in my head: I had wondered whether that poster would count my childhood as domestic abuse.
The one thought that I remember thinking was that although I saw children in my future, I want a child made from pure love, not a one-night stand fuelled by pure desire. As much as Joel and I make an okay couple, we're too young and selfish, and not in enough love. When I want a child, I want to know the other parent inside out, I want to be with them long enough to know what they'll be like. I knew at that moment that I could not be Gabriel's mother, but I also knew I couldn't take those pills.
Joel shifts in the bed, and when I think he's going to wake up, he doesn't. He looks so peaceful, yet the IV lines and the blood pressure cuff, the beeping of the machine, the diagnosis swimming in my brain like a gospel: Juvenile Huntington's Disease.
'This will kill me, Aspen.' Joel's words, his conviction when he said that line to me... it all flutters around my head like a wasp.
I shake my head. I should be looking at him with sadness, empathy, and love. But all I can think about is the lie, the fifty per cent chance Gabriel will inherit it, and the fact that Joel knew when I was pregnant.
