‘History begins with someone else’s memory of you.’ This is how Julia Cohen opens her essay on abortion for the New England Review, and I know this because I have been relentlessly scouring the internet for essays on abortion and for poems, song lyrics and admissions of any kind. History begins with someone else’s memory of you, and my mother tells me that, as I pressed steadily on the fleshy walls of her womb 28 years ago while she lay in the rickety restored cubbyhouse she shared with my father, a home brief and unassuming, she knew me. She couldn’t possibly have known me, which seems a cruel but necessary diagnosis. I tell myself this because, if history begins with someone else’s memory of you, if my mother knew me then, my own child’s history began at my kitchen basin as I heaved bile and worry, the smell of my cat’s litter fixed in my nostrils like some kind of malignant aura or rotten eggs. The air carrying a thick decay around me, never leaving. Until, of course, it did. Three weeks later, my queasiness departing my body with the same fervour, the same immediacy that my pregnancy did. A moment. A womb the shape of a could-be home. A sort-of child, as in something, someone, brief and unassuming.

A month after my abortion, a friend meets me for a drink at Jones Park, a hilly stretch of grass in Brunswick East that looks over the city. She brings a casket of tea, I bring two beers. Apart from the occasional drop of booze, I am sober: a deliberate and necessary decision I made after my termination in a hopeless bid to bury my addiction to grass and powder in the cavities of my past, alongside my stunted pregnancy. My eyes well and leak, and before hers do too, she asks me if I’ve listened to Joanna Newsom’s track ‘Baby Birch’. She is not the first to ask me this. I haven’t, but in the dimness of my room that evening, I do. Seven times. ‘I saw a rabbit as slick as a knife and as pale as a candlestick, and I had thought it’d be harder to do but I caught her and skinned her quick,’ she mewls. The metaphor is grim, visceral. In one live performance I stumble across, Newsom gazes longingly at nothing in particular—how presumptuous of me—before closing her eyes and resting her head on her harp’s golden body, something akin to a shoulder. My instrument is my journal, is this page. Is word. But when the doctor tells me that people generally feel relief after an abortion, I want to scribble over my sorrow furiously, in the same ballpoint pen I used to jot it down.