Blue Line

A hand sweeps across the mirror, clearing the dense mist that has settled over it – a mist of steam and perjured guilt: mine. Brown eyes mirror themselves in a pooled reflection and then trail upward.

I watch the reflection of my fingers rest on the base of my neck observing their steady formation – the absence of a rock on the third finger no longer an abject eyesore. They leave a smudged trail where they have rubbed against my clavicle, then move towards where a pulse beats, pleasant in its singularity. Another finger trails towards my mouth and rubs lower lip and a hereditary chin; a frown crosses my brows at the thought of how hereditary it might be.

I think of my mother, from whom I have inherited this trait – a chin that frowns, and wonder whether love is really as in-built as it has been made to sound by the generations of women preceding me. All I can think of, as selfish as it may seem, is how my body will change, how my appearance will significantly alter because of one night. That I might learn to love the small fetus within me seems alien because what if love isn’t an inborn trait? What if I feel nothing but revulsion for the life growing within my belly? That will one day suckle from my breasts?

I touch them gingerly knowing that they will grow to an embarrassing size with the milk destined for the small mouth of the life within. What do I know of this thing, anyway?

I haven’t even named you yet.

I look at my stomach, and envisage it gradually protruding week after unending week, month to month until I will no longer be able to look my reflection in the eye.

Reaching across, I retrieve the bathrobe from its hook – airport hotels always have a robe warm and long enough to both cover and dry the wettest of bodies. But when I open it, balls of the material cling to me. Not the best quality, I concede but it satisfies its purpose. At least airport hotels exist here, I think with a smile unlike home where you are forced to wait out a thirty-six hour transit in a lounge.

Home…
family.

How can I tell the people who are supposed to know me best, closest to me, the ones let in on those intimate details, that their baby, a person closer than close, an embryonic cell, an extension of themselves; is suddenly laden with a burden of her own? Especially when you (yes, Ammi…I’m talking about you) don’t even know I’ve been seeing people, having relationships, falling in love? Just what am I supposed to say? That I’ve made a terrible mistake? That I can’t make head nor tails out of my life right now and that it, as I now know it, is forever over? That everything I hold dear – myself, my family, my mind now hinges on the balance a blue line will bring? What if there is no balance? What if this is the end?

Don’t.
Don’t frown, Ammi. I know what you’re thinking.

I can feel the tear trickle down my cheek before I see it fall down hers – I can hear my mother’s comfort whispering in my ears, telling me that her granddaughter’s life needn’t hinge on something so impossibly insecure. But I can not help the pair of eyes I carry with me, like a chip on the shoulder. They have seen right through my nonchalance as I picked up the pregnancy test at the airport, kept my shaking hands at bay, and walked with assumed confidence through the hotel doors. It was only when I stood naked before the mirror that I felt them avert in shame. Judging eyes of the people I had hoped to leave behind the moment I boarded the plane, the determination for which has since left me.

Yet a part of me rebels, and I force myself to think of the many nights leading up to the final moment, the climax of investing myself – my emotions, my body, my being into a resolution that promised to bring me to some form of fulfillment. I will not regret it.
I don’t.
I cannot and have now been brought full circle.

As I push open the bathroom door, the bedroom’s temperate fumes escape from its crevices, sending in a blast of cold which for a moment, nearly knocks the air out of me.

The box lies in its own pool of light, wearing its halo of innocence. I turn it over and over in my hands, until I have the lettering memorized, its edges searing my skin.

Am I ready to make a decision? Is this really the place where I can bypass the traditions and norms that bind me? But after all, what more neutral place to make up your mind than in the customary no-man’s land? One foot in Islamabad, the next in Amsterdam in transit, is it fair to judge me?

One phone call and I can simplify everything – one phone call and it’s done. I become the person I have struggled to unlearn.

It is useless, I know – she will offer me advice I am not willing to take. Strong, sensible words but I am in no mood to entertain sensibility.

I am not strong enough, I realize and I press my palm to my stomach. I am not strong enough for you.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

**
Somewhere in the room I have left behind, a blue line flickers on and off on the mantelpiece as the sun’s final rays settle on the empty room.

And in the distance, the faint sound of the airplane as we rumble off the runway.