Saturn’s Return
The February I am twenty-six, on the day before I’m supposed to fly to Portland to rent a house, I come down with the most brutal and short-lived flu I’ve ever had. My body aches so badly, I can’t move. When I say this, I don’t just mean that it hurts to move—I worry, when I’m describing pain, even just to myself, that I’m being melodramatic, hyperbolic.
Tonight, I’m frozen by it.
After my first breakup, I was unable to drive on the street where he worked, to eat, to sleep in my own bed at night. Eventually, a little scared of myself, I went to see a husband and wife who practiced Santeria. It made as much sense as anything.
They had a little storefront at a strip mall in Albuquerque, filled with Guadalupe candles, milagros, and Tarot decks. They reminded me of kindly abuelos, until the husband told me that all my suffering stemmed from a spell that had been cast on my mother, that it had been passed on to me.
He told me that he could break the spell if I participated in a cleansing ritual involving a rooster. The cuandero would transfer the black magic into the rooster, and I would be freed. He saw me hesitate, took my hand, and asked me if I was suicidal. I told him I wasn’t, which was true.
“You will be,” he said. “Soon.” Shaken, I scheduled the ritual, but the day of, I chickened out, so to speak, canceled on his voicemail. A few years later, the woman I thought of as a second mother told me that she’d gone to see the couple after a run of bad luck, that he’d given her a similar warning about spells and suicide, recommended the rooster ritual. She went through with it.
“I saw that rooster die,” she told me. She thought maybe the santero had poisoned it, but she couldn’t say for sure.
My mother stops by, briefly, with supplies (she is, as I knew she would be, annoyed by the request), leaves water on the carpet beside my bed. I have to call her an hour later to come back, because by then I am unable to reach down and get it. She’s so good at sighing right into the phone.
It’s terrifying, lying alone in my two-story house, realizing that I physically cannot extend myself enough to pick up a glass, but somewhat gratifying at the same time. I appreciate symptoms I can quantify, point to them again and again: this is how it happened, here’s the proof, it was real.
The first few months in Portland were lonely, miserable. I made an appointment with a tarot card reader in Kenton: she had only five-star reviews on Yelp. I knew I wouldn’t fully believe anything she told me, but I reasoned that she’d have at least one positive prediction, and that this would give me something to hope for. Instead, Miss Renée told me that I was only at the beginning of a years-long struggle. She said that it would be a period of change and growth, but the benefits of these changes would not be apparent until they were complete. I’d be all movement, but it would feel like I was standing still.
“Let me put it this way,” she said. “If a woman is in labor, how many other things do you expect her to be doing?”
My temperature eventually shoots above 103, and my mother calls a friend, a doctor, to ask her what to do.
“Pile on the blankets,” the doctor says. “As many as she can stand.”
My mom asks shouldn’t I take something to bring the fever down instead?
“No,” she says. “Her body needs to fight through it.”
Whenever I tell this story, I mention how that night I’d soaked through two sets of sheets, as though I’d wet the bed. I think this detail makes the whole thing more believable.
The day before my abortion, my therapist advised me not to take the full dose of Ativan they would offer me.
“I worry,” she said, “That feeling removed from your body during the procedure would be more triggering than the pain.” She thought that this could actually be an opportunity for healing.
I followed her advice, skipped the second pill. It took less than ten minutes: three sharp pulls. My boyfriend stood to the right of me, the volunteer to the left; her job, she explained, was to hold my hand and tell me I was doing great. He performed his role not quite as well, too wrapped up in his guilt over my pain. The whole time we were together, I tried and failed to hide it.
I’d start squeezing both their hands before each pull; the doctor warned me when they were coming, every time.
A year later, I would be asked to share my Planned Parenthood story. I wrote about how I’ve rarely felt so cared for and so safe.
Before she leaves for the night, my mom calls upstairs: do I want her to lock the door behind her, and in my fried egg-brain, I tell her to leave it open. I’ll never know why she listened to me, or why she asked at all.
We split up not long after the abortion. I realized I’d rather be heartbroken and alone than pretend that I wasn’t. Our short relationship seemed pointlessly painful, so I went back to Miss Renée to ask what I was meant to learn from in falling in love with someone who stopped loving me the second he felt needed.
“All of it was about his karma, not yours,” she said. “This relationship had nothing to do with you.”
I imagine that people who never go to psychics don’t know how mean they can be.
My mom’s never been much of a nurturer. After she left my dad, she became more attached to her job; less, I felt, to me. Now I realize this was more a reflection of how precarious our financial situation was, the danger of unemployment. I think she was terrified that she wouldn’t be able to support us on her own.
I hated how she always refused to come pick me up when I called her from the nurse’s office, where I spent so many hours lying on that grey vinyl cot with the paper-covered pillow. She never stayed home with me when I was sick either, though, to be fair, I claimed to be sick pretty often.
When I was younger, I would periodically be up all night, nauseous, sobbing, until I finally threw up. One doctor finally diagnosed these as stomach migraines, though no one was ever able to find a cause. They stopped around seventh grade, but I continued to use them as an excuse to miss class through high school.
Many years later, I found an article about how chronic stomach problems can be a way for children to manifest hidden pain. My memories are rarely visual, but I remember sitting at the computer reading that explanation, alone, the house quiet, how the background of the survivor website was inexplicably mauve, that the dogs were napping on the guest bed, and the sunlight was split against tiles.
After I moved back home, I began to see an acupuncturist who told me my body still thought that it was pregnant. In our first session, I gave him the bullet points of my history: when it started, when it was stopped, what I remember. I’ve become good at doing this quickly, at striking a balance of being precise with the more upsetting details without lingering in them. I don’t get emotional, but I try not to sound too clinical either, like I understand the weight of my story, but I’m no longer crushed by it. He told me that they were fucking assholes. I liked hearing his anger.
The D.O.M. put needles in my toes, at the corners of my eyes, and through my underwear, connecting them with a gold silk ion cord. I’d lie on his table, almost naked beneath the white sheet, feeling increasingly nauseous but safe. He’d stand at my feet, speak rapidly in his beautiful British accent about archetypes and mythology, about how I had been trapped as Sleeping Beauty, how it was time to embrace my own wounded inner child. He wanted me to tell her:
I’m so sorry that this happened to you, but I’m here now, and it’s going to be okay.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I hear footsteps coming up the stairs. At first, I pull them into my fever dreams: maybe it’s my mom, or my ex, or my friend Sumitra, already here to drive me to the airport. Suddenly, I am fully awake; I realize that it is still black outside and in my room, that the footsteps are real, and that I am paralyzed and alone in the master bedroom of my two-story house.
“Hello?” I call from under the damp sheets. The footsteps stop.
“Hello?” comes a man’s voice.
“Hello?” I don’t know what else to say.
“I think I’ve got the wrong house,” says the man.
“Yes,” I say.
“I’m leaving now.”
“Yes,” I say.
I hear him go, and I fall back asleep. When I wake up two hours later, my fever has broken. My sheets, still wet, are cold.
Once I was at a sitting by a bonfire, telling someone the story of when the man walked up my stairs. Another guy heard us talking, interrupted me to ask, deadpan:
“Is this when you get raped?” The best punchlines are surprising, yet expected.
There’s an energy worker in Santa Fe who has, at times, almost a year-long waiting list: people say that he performs miracles, though they are unable to explain what it is he does. He charges $120 per visit and doesn’t take insurance, but he won’t see anyone more than three times. If his methods haven’t worked by then, he can’t help you.
I finally made it off the list before I moved away again. I saw him twice. He had me sit straight in a chair facing away from him, repeatedly and aloud asked my heart about its relationship with the electromagnetic field of the sun. He held a vibrating instrument on my lower back. It made my skin tickle until it itched, until I couldn’t stand it. He would knock, with his fists, around my body, call to it:
“Amelia’s left ventricle! Amelia’s left ventricle!”
On the second visit, I lay on his table as he knocked and knocked against my back, and I felt a tremendous pressure building and building, my cheek pressed against the cool white sheet. Finally, something inside of me shifted, broke, and I gasped. He sat down in the chair beside me and was quiet for a long time.
“He hurt you so badly,” he said. I was touched by his sadness.
When, at twenty-six, I decided to break up with my boyfriend and move across the country alone with some vague idea of starting over, everyone in Santa Fe told me that my Saturn return had come early. Every twenty-nine-ish years, Saturn completes its orbit around the sun. This means that in your late twenties, Saturn is approaching the point in its orbit when your life began. Some people believe that this return brings the urge, in some form or another, to see it begin again.
