The New Sense

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

I'm writing this on the 4th. Yesterday was pretty heavy. I tried to avoid discussing anything serious with B— but he just sat me down in the kitchen and told me he thought I should have an abortion. I can't even explain how I felt. Angry? Disturbed? Sad? I asked him why.
"There are lots of reasons. I'm not a stable guy — you know that. I do love you but I might not be around forever. And I'm physically different from normal people, so who knows what could be wrong with the baby? If the baby does turn out to have my sense, what kind of life will he have? Will he be hunted like me? Will they catch him and experiment on him? What if they steal him from you while he's still a baby? Even if he avoids all that, he might have a much worse time dealing with his difference than I did. All this to say, maybe you should have a child when you're really ready, and with someone who's going to be a better father than me."
"Wow. You're serious aren't you?"
"Uh-huh."
"But I love you."
And that was the only reason I needed. I guess it has sunk in over the last two weeks and slowly grown — the feeling that I wanted to have this baby. And the feeling that I love B— so much I want to spend my life with him. Maybe it's just hormones, but that's okay — I'm a woman, I'm pregnant and I'm allowed to feel what I feel. This isn't a rational decision; it's more like a seed that grows and takes on a new form. It's just inevitable. A seed doesn't decide to become a plant — it just develops. The idea that I want to start a family with B— has just developed. Reading this back, it sounds so wishy-washy, but that's the only way I can explain it.
B— looked at me with an indefinable expression. What does he 'see'? What is his world like? I want to find out, and that's the bottom line. Is that what love is — you want to find out what the other person's world is like?
"You should think about all this," he said.
"Maybe, but I know how I feel. You should be able to understand that."
"Why?"
"Because it's like your sense; just like I can't imagine seeing the world the way you do, you can never know how a woman feels about having a baby inside."
"Okay - that's a good point."
"Yes, and you can say what you like but if I want to have this baby then I will."
"That's a good point too. I'm not going to change my opinion though. This isn't going to be easy."
"Fine — I accept your point and I'll think about it."
I slept really badly and so did B—. He explained to me this morning that the real reason he doesn't sleep well in apartment buildings is that he senses the movements of the people in the other apartments. It's a bit like sleeping with the light on, he said. Being downtown doesn't help much either, apparently. I still don't really believe him about his sense though. It holds together logically to a certain extent, but I just don't believe it. I asked him about the attempted rape. Just how could he 'sense' what was going on in that building when there were probably loads of people moving around in their apartments in the buildings nearby. He said that it was a bit like seeing something out of the corner of your eye — something catches your attention and then you have to actively focus on it to be able to tell what it is. He did admit that he hadn't been sure what was going on when he ran up the stairs, but that there was something weird about the way the two people in the apartment were moving together.
I asked him how he could even sense people by their gravity when people weigh so much less than the buildings they're in, and of course considerably less than the planet. He admitted that when he was growing up he couldn't focus his sense so accurately, but that he started seriously practising when he was a teenager. He explained that it's all about detecting changes in the gravitational field, so if people are moving around in a house he can tell. The planet is just background noise to him that he's got used to over the years, like the sound of a fan or the rumbling of traffic.

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posted by Sara