Be awful in the mornings. Rushed, whiny, and unable to leave the house without plucking your eyebrows, yet still ambivalent about the glorious slice of nutella toast your mother made for you. Yell “that’s not how it works!” when she tells you to eat it in the car. You are right–the car ride will be bumpy, and windy, and you have no juice to wash the toast down with–and wrong–people eat in the car all the time, you just hate the shape of your face as of late, how it’s gone round and soft, how your cheeks have filled up with baby fat you thought you’d never see again. 

In the car, do not give in. Keep up that awful mood, yelling “dammit!” when “Friday I’m In Love” by The Cure only plays on the aux for a few bars before deciding to stop. This is an old car. It smells like sunburns, and has an old aux cord that goes quiet if you move it even an inch. You unplug then replug, unplug then replug, yell “dammit!” again. Your father says nothing.  When “Friday I’m In Love” finally starts playing, you listen to it in stony silence.

I don’t care if Monday’s blue

Tuesday's gray and Wednesday's too…

It’s a Sunday, actually. A terrible one. You woke up at one in the afternoon, which is not unusual for you, but it is still unquestionably a failure. The pain, as it always does, crashed into your stomach like a doomed vessel smashing itself on some lighthouse-less rocks. You hugged a heating pad close to yourself and lay on your mattress, cursing everything. You were so hungry. The emptiness of your stomach and the illness combined to make you cry in pain, breathing in and out like a woman in a movie about to give birth. But there is no baby. There is no reason to cry, there is nothing worth becoming poetic about. The sweat on your forehead is gross. Your arms are grosser. And no one will ever want them. 

You can write forever about the horridness of your own biology, the girls you never dated but still think about, any pain you’re going through really. But everyone has had their heart broken. Everyone has had their stomach become nuclear, had tears fall from their eyes sideways. Pain is ruthlessly common. Some people give their illnesses names. You have tried, unsuccessfully, to name yours Susan. It didn’t stick. Maybe you should write about The Cure. Not everyone has listened to The Cure.

Thursday I don’t care about you

It’s Friday, I’m in love!

You read once that Robert Smith wrote “Friday I’m In Love” to make fun of the vapid pop music on the radio. That cannot be true, you decide. He sounds so happy. You cannot write with an intent to skewer anything but yourself. This is not an obstacle. A good writer can take slivers of themselves and plant them in their backyard. Water them and watch them grow into pale-skinned bloodsuckers, or defeated heroes, or lonely witches. You will beam in pride, then rearrange these fully-grown former bits of skin into new shapes. Turn them against each other. Give them dreams about falling in love. It will make you feel like a god. Late at night, these creatures will tap on your windows. Or, if you’ve been very foolish, and forgot to close your doors, they will gather in the corners of your room. They will do nothing but stand there. You will do nothing but sob.

Arrive at the hospital. Why are hospitals always white? You suppose it’s a soothing color. Clinical. If hospital walls were in all black, or red, you might think you’d entered the gates of hell. But your father hates hospitals, and so do you. He hates them because of his mom, how she died slowly, from cancer that spread, and nurses that held her hand while she recovered from becoming radioactive. How she never got better, just became dependent on more and more people. You hate them because he hates them. Because he has never cried in front of you, but he has always been the most miserable man you have ever met. 

One of the most unfortunate assets a writer can gain is a sad father. You can use him for inspiration, of course, but he can also become the only inspiration you’ve got. You think of a scene from Joan Didion’s biopic, The Center Cannot Hold. You watched it in school. Her nephew is interviewing her about an article she wrote for some highbrow magazine. It was on a trip she and her not-yet-dead husband had been to Honolulu. A trip that, she wrote, was taken “in lieu of filing for divorce.”

“Did he read that?” Her nephew asked, off camera. 

“He edited that,” she answered. Calm, cool. 

Though we never see his face, her nephew’s voice has the distinct tone of someone who just balked. “He edited it? So how does that…?”

A few murmurs and half-questions later, Didion puts a cap on his curiosity. “We thought, generally, that you, you wrote what–you used your material. You wrote what you had. That was what I happened to have at the moment.”

What you have now is the hospital waiting room, which is called “The Hills.” It is the only waiting room you are ever directed to. The other three are named “The Rivers,” “The Mountains,” and “The Valleys.” Aside from a few blob-like paintings of green hills on the walls, the waiting room doesn’t really stick to its theme. Which is a shame. This is the only hospital you’ve been to with themed waiting rooms. Maybe you can write about this.  

Your dad waits with you. He always does. He prefers to stand near the doorway, his back to the wall. You prefer to slouch on an honestly very comfortable green armchair. It’s the kind that coats its hard skeleton in miles of cushions. Makes an enemy of sharp angles. Maybe this is a minimalist way of sticking to the hills theme. You hate minimalism. This is one more thing you hate because of your dad. He was once an artist, and now is a graphic designer. He told you once that this career shift was because of you. That he wasted most of his life on a degree in painting, and when he and your mom decided to have a child, the decision to abandon his last attempts at professional artistry was clear. After this he told you that if you want to be an artist, you will have to choose the art over the baby, the art over everything else. He is probably right. You do not think of this as a difficult choice. You have never wanted children. 

The wait isn’t too long. This is bad. Writers are supposed to get used to waiting. You should know by now to write down every conversation you overhear, to become one all-observing beacon of human interaction. Maybe you can write about this. This hunger to overhear, but never to speak. When the nurse calls your name, you stand up slowly. Your awful mood has cooled down, turned into cement lodged in your cheeks. 

You turn to your dad, still standing against the door. He is wearing what he always wears: a wrinkled gray hoodie and equally wrinkled jeans. One night, when you were very little, you saw him in a plaid shirt. He was getting ready for a fancy dinner. Obviously. But you didn’t understand, just stood in shock, floored by the presence of anything new. 

“Should my dad come with me?” A question you should know the answer to by now. But you have only been here enough to memorize the feeling, never the details. A writer should know every detail.

“Um, I don’t know. Do you want him to?” The nurse talks like every nurse does. A little nice, a little removed. Like some advanced hyper-friendly robot.

When you awoke from your laparoscopy a year ago, a surgery that was supposed to find endometriosis but instead gave you two matching scars on your belly, each shaped like a crescent moon, each no bigger than a dollar coin, you awoke to gossiping nurses. You were coughing too much. The details of your surgery, the parts that went wrong or right, were but TV drama to them. One escorted you to the bathroom, where you looked at your post-surgery stomach for the first time. It was smeared in blood.

“I guess not,” you answer. When you showed your dad the blood smear later, he offered to beat the surgeon up. It was a joke. Not a funny one. 

In the doctor’s office, you tell her what you’ve been telling every doctor for years. That you don’t do drugs. You have no allergies. The pain is constant, and has no clear triggers. Yes, you are in pain right now. You’re not on any medications currently. You tried antidepressants last year but weaned yourself off them. She has you lay down, and presses her hands down on your stomach. You tell her it doesn’t hurt any more than when she’s not pressing. And she tells you she doesn’t know what to do.

The doctor’s coat is white, but from her neck hangs a variety of multicolored chains. One is a rainbow pin on a string that reads “she/her/hers.” Another is an ID. She sits on a cabinet, resting her feet on a black spinning chair. “I mean,” she says, “it seems like, from a gynecological standpoint at least, there’s not much more we can do. You have options, absolutely, and it could still be endometriosis, because it can be microscopic, but–I mean I think it’s very unlikely. At this point.”

And as you open your mouth to speak, you realize you are one syllable aware from crying. And there is no one you’d like to cry in front of less than this doctor. For some reason, she is it. The last of the last. “Can I ask my dad to come in actually? I feel like he knows more about my, whole, my whole medical history.” 

She nods. “Of course!” 

You text him, and eventually he arrives, and spends ten minutes laughing uncomfortably about chinese herbs and acupuncture and chronic pain clinics. Maybe you can write about acupuncture. Maybe you can write a whole novel about these uniquely Berkeley things, the glowing box called the ‘biocharger’ that your mother’s friends pay to sit in a room with. You do not trust it, and you do not trust this nurse. A writer should not trust, you decide. A writer should be the ultimate skeptic, only caring about the ghosts they craft out of words. 

The nurse is going over one of the many terrible, terrible options left. “We could do this thing where we halt the hormonal process completely. It effectively puts her in menopause. And she’s seventeen, so young–”

“Yeah,” another hollow laugh from your dad. “I wish she didn’t have to deal with something like this, where she is now. It’s not fun.” 

“I’m sorry we couldn’t find a cause,” the doctor says. “I know that’s really frustrating. But when it’s affecting her quality of life like this–”

“No, I get it.”

“Just–looking into treatment options might–”

You don’t end up crying in front of the doctor, but you do end up closely examining a diagram of a uterus on the wall. It shows each layer of muscle. Have a recurring image in your head, not a nightmare, not a daydream, of cutting your leg open with a knife and removing every bit of muscle until you are but skin and bone, no blood, no nerves, no neurons. Decide this is not a bad thought. It doesn’t make you feel bad, to imagine yourself hollowed out. 

Back in the car, you put on “Frug” by Rilo Kiley. It’s the only Rilo Kiley song you know. So it sails through your head devoid of artistic commentary, only some lyrics you laugh at and others you hum along to. The cover for the song is abstract. Made up of three colors: red, blue, and beige. Deliberately faceless. Wonder why the drive home always seems shorter than the drive there. Ask your dad what he meant by “something like this.”

And I can hate your girl

I can tell you that she's real pretty

He says he means something unsolvable. Something like his knees. His old, crumbling knees that can’t run anymore. They became a problem before you were born. All your life, you’ve walked ahead of him. You feel like crying again. 

I can take my clothes off

I cannot fall in love

You look at yourself in the passenger side mirror, and you know the year and a half of trying to find a cause was for nothing. You know the pain was for nothing. That it has not taught you anything, and it never will. You know that you have but one life, and you have spent three years of it mired in pain. Attempting to find inspiration in the unsolvable. Making abstract sculptures of black goop. Staining your fingers. Yelling at the witches under your bed when they can’t do anything with the goop either. You know the pain has made you into a worse person, and it is your job alone to undo this. And you know you’re never getting better. 

You'll never see my eyes

I will not call you back…

And you know you’re never getting better.