ANTI-JOURNAL by Sandra Aliandy
CW: Medical setting, needle/injection, drinking, sexual content, mentions of animal death
After breaking up with my boyfriend in the summer of 2018, I booked a pap smear appointment. The physician told me I was “all good down there” and asked if I was on birth control. I wasn’t.
“There’s the pill, of course, but we also offer Depo-Provera shots,” said the physician, “in case you don’t wanna bother with taking a pill at the same time every day, y’know?”
She made it sound as if I was making the choice between two tops in Zara. “The Depo shot then,” I said.
The shot didn’t hurt. My physician clapped my shoulder when she was done and I flinched like a small animal. “No more preggers!” she cheered.
By the time I broke up with my boyfriend, I had been celibate for over a year. Before I got together with him, I never spent weekends in my own bed. I’d starve myself come Friday, stay out all evening hopping bar to club to bar—rabbit in heat—all the way through Saturday, walk back home on Sunday gorgeously dry all over but my cunt would be slick, smelling like spit.
My boyfriend—ex, but this sounds really funny, considering we never fucked—used to comment that my hands were too sweaty. We googled “hyperhidrosis” once. He called my hands the Niagara Falls. I tackled him onto the carpeted floor.
I resented my boyfriend because I thought he was why I stopped getting wet. I blamed him for trying to keep my pack of cigarettes away from me, inspired by an episode of Lost, as if I couldn’t easily run down the corner store and buy another.
Smirnoff only made me cry. I was perpetually dehydrated. I think I was dying. Fingering myself was like forcing sweaty digits into new latex gloves.
I stayed resentful of my boyfriend because the Depo-Provera shot confirmed my worst fear: I was dying. My pantiliners were brown for five months. I drank sugary coolers the entire time. In those five months, I fantasized about a friend who lived on the other side of the globe, I dreamt of fucking a best friend of mine who was blasphemously asexual. I woke up with thin, brown gunk seeping out between my legs. I was dying.
You thrash about one last time before you fully accept death. I thought that was how rabbits go about dying, anyway. So I dressed up like one—some black satin dress, I don’t recall that evening too well—and bussed to the nearest club. The first thing I did when I entered was start a tab at the bar. I was five drinks in when I finally stepped onto the dancefloor. Digitalistic Night—I wanted to hear Daft Punk, but the DJ wouldn’t listen, and this stopped mattering after my eighth drink, anyway.
I danced with everyone. I let anyone buy me drinks. I gave a squat, middle-aged Arabian man (he wore a suit and a scarf!) a false number (from a video game) while grinding my crotch against his. Someone slipped coins between my breasts when I started slut-dropping onstage, ass facing the DJ booth. I helped a girl out of her tank top and she yelled in my face, “I love you!”
The next morning, I woke up cleanly showered with two-hundred dollars on my credit card’s last statement. I was bloated; when I swiped my fingers through my cunt, it smelled like nothing. It felt like nothing. I rolled onto my stomach, back to sleep. I failed at fucking like a rabbit, so might as well die like one: in hibernation. The rabbit has died.
Sandra Aliandy is an Indonesian writer now based in Vancouver. She likes watching celebrities screw up and has been looping the same song for the past month. Her tweets can be found @tinycpr