HALF-ROOM,HALF-MOON by Gabriela Halas
There are six of us women in this room. We all have the same eyes. The same half-moons circled under aged skin that ranges; some of us are in our 20s, some in our 30s, our 40s. Light and shadow play across our half-moons, sculpt deeper trenches for some. We share the same look back and forth with one another that says: I get you, though no one else does. Some days one of us shudders a cry, lets a few tears loose in the room, and we all shift forward almost imperceptibly. The room we share, for this hour-long meeting, flickers wall to wall to wall in a blue-light sheen. My eyes travel to each woman’s face, and I see myself, there, in the room.
I said room but I really meant “room” – this “virtual” space none of us could have imagined existing in, let alone found solace, respite from an outside world we don’t quite know how to fully engage with. We look, almost unaware, past the tiny dot our computer sees us with, projecting our tired nearly-defeated- but- still- courageous eyes to others in this flat two-dimensional space. This room has become a beacon of sorts, the meet‑up link we add to our phones or computers to remind us: here is a link of true support and understanding—link to link makes a chain which we use to climb out of our pain, our rage. The link can be clicked, almost flippantly, though none of us take this time lightly. We are all unquestioningly grateful, so goddamn grateful for technology, that offers second, third, fourth, fifth (etc.) chances to get at something we want. We don’t talk about what we want, though; we talk about how we are, what is happening to us: our procedural updates, the nuances of calendar and cycle timing, medications and injections, self-advocacy, a doctor’s comment that cut deep with insensitivity, or a best friend whose letter received last week revealed her at‑ease spontaneous pregnancy, and yes, at your shared age of 40.
On the screen, in a small box, lined neatly next to other little boxes of women’s faces I’ve never met, is the organizer/ moderator of our infertility support group. Jenn self-started the group when Covid forced us all indoors, and I found her one desperate afternoon when I felt like my mouth was a frozen river of words. My body was a fucked‑up mess of questions and disappointment, and my head was swimming in regret and fear. Next to her on screen is Kate, married this summer in a field of lavender (in that small window of time when we thought Covid might finally just be scrubbed away like stubborn, sticky dirt). She sits on a black faux-leather high-backed office chair, her entire body leaning on one shiny arm where a torn section reveals white fluff. The chair never swivels but Kate’s one hand picks at this fluff. Melia lays across pillows and a bunched comforter, propped with phone in hand. Her giant pit-bull- looking dog bumps the phone with his love when she speaks; it’s a sweet distraction. Karen’s small shoulders slope in a green V‑neck t‑shirt and when her tears come, her dimples appear, and I can almost picture her at age 12 or 15, but instead I see her today, between 35 and 40. She always wears her hair in a down-the- neck ponytail and twists it for the duration of our call, fraying the ends with hands that an outsider would describe as stressed (we take issue with this word); it is more like perpetual longing. Faz sits on a dull-brown couch, with a window always open to her left. Her face looms somewhat disproportionately from the rest of her body, displaced by a higher-than- screen angle, and a hand with a hairy forearm brings her at least four cups of tea throughout our call. And me? I sit cross-legged on an IKEA chair that a couple sold to me years ago, after their young daughter no longer needed to be rocked asleep. I thought, in all my naivety, that I too would be dealing with midnight feedings soon enough, and that it was a lucky sign to buy this chair that had served them so well. Now the chair is where I go to sit in my office, close the door, and open my laptop to these women and our carefully measured hope. We are not trying to impress anyone and don’t care if the lighting is bad, or we are wearing stained hoodies, or if we’ve got double chins based on the angle of the camera.
Through the computer screen, my eyes wander from their faces to the backgrounds of rooms they occupy in whatever towns they live in. Walls, windows, chairs. There is something about the blue light of a screen that makes each white wall behind them appear dull and featureless. There is nothing through the small window of each camera that lets me know who these women are, but they don’t feel like strangers. I only know what they do in relation to their various “treatments,” and I know that we share something few people, even other women, would remotely understand. Jenn reminds us that we were people before we were so‑called infertile women (I personally like fertility-challenged), and that this will one day be over, and we’ll no longer be here. In this room. Virtually sharing. Physically distant. Distant not only by some external force, but also by what our bodies are not allowing us to do. We will no longer be occupied by what we want. We will, instead, embrace being built of what we have. Being in this room means we are not quite there yet. The room we occupy is some weird liminal temporary space, and I suppose most support groups are – temporary (we hope) – though some are formed to last a lifetime. We know this one has an end. Somewhere. Somehow.
I shift into a cross-legged position in my chair and lean against the sloped back. Karen’s face, beautifully framed, is recalling how her husband does not “believe” in IUI (intrauterine insemination) and she does not know if she will ever convince him to get tested for male factor infertility, let alone try IUI or IVF; it’s been five years of trying. Faz and I have similar issues, low egg reserves and “advanced” age, and several cycles of IUI and IVF have produced only bad news after bad news. We resent when family and friends tell us to “de-stress,” as though that is the problem holding our bodies back. Melia also shares a similar history but has recently had good news, and after four IVF attempts and three fertilized embryos, she’s recently had two transferred. Inside her grow and divide the cells of many years of fucking hard work and a whole lot of heartbreak.
We’ve adapted to this space, like we have temporarily adapted to the place our bodies are in. I think about these women when I click leave meeting and they disappear for another couple weeks. I wonder who they are once they have left our shared “room.” Despite how nice it would be to meet in person, we share a profound intimacy as simply faces on a screen. And though we can’t touch across this strange space we inhabit, I feel physically close to these women – wire, glass, micro-chips, rare earth metals – tangible items I can hold in my hands. The word “virtual” no longer relevant – we are blood and muscle suspended, momentarily, in the camera’s eye, in each other’s eyes.
Gabriela Halas’ essays have appeared in Whitefish Review, Grain, Pilgrimage, untethered magazine, and High Country News. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in subTerrain, Broken Pencil, Prairie Fire, and The Louisville Review.