An Emergency Room of One’s Own
Emma Carter (she/her)
Emma is a postgraduate media student working on unceded Gadigal Land whose work focuses on tragicomedy and locality. After spending a year living in London working in production and publishing, Emma realised she was interested in documenting the Australian inner-city and the urban share-house experience after noticing this facet of Australian culture was overlooked.
Image credit of Devika Suri
Eora
On Saturday through to Sunday I had good quality casual sex.
He pressed down on my pelvis, and I was drenched.
What was that?
On Sunday afternoon I bled everywhere
All over my white nightgown like some kind of Sofia Coppola character.
On Monday I drank Ural religiously and wore no underwear.
On Monday I went to a Chilean event remembering the Coup D’état.
They sang Spanish resistance songs and I tried to join in.
On Monday I told my boyfriend how I felt.
On Monday I ate noodles with Johannes and Erin.
On Monday they told me it was okay to do it.
On Monday I listened to my boyfriend cry on a plane.
I could hear the seatbelt sign in the background.
I’m sure it was Ryan Air.
On Tuesday I got a new phone.
Finally.
No more cracked purple fuck phone.
It came with a free speaker.
I have listened to music on it every day.
On Tuesday I bought Bepanthen because I was still bleeding, and my labia was on fire.
On Tuesday I tried to walk back from Broadway shopping centre to Erskineville, both phones in factory mode and a scrunched sushi roll in my hand.
On Tuesday I started bleeding everywhere in Victoria Park.
I was wearing another white dress.
Why are all my dresses white?
On Tuesday I decided to avoid King Street on my way home.
I was scared to see someone I knew.
I’d tell them everything and regret it.
On Tuesday I walked down Wilson Street with a dress covered in blood.
Front and back.
On Tuesday my manager was at One Another, enjoying a coffee.
I waved to him through the window.
Covered in blood.
Sushi roll asphyxiated.
On Tuesday I crawled into bed and lay paralysed.
I ate the sushi roll.
On Tuesday I diagnosed myself with herpes and sent photos of my inflamed vagina to two of my friends.
On Tuesday night I went to work.
On Tuesday night I lasted three hours.
On Tuesday night my glands began to swell. I felt feverish and bled more.
On Tuesday I knew I had herpes.
On Tuesday I walked to RPA.
I had never been in emergency before.
On Tuesday I sat in emergency by myself.
At midnight a nurse triaged me and gave me some plastic containers to urinate in.
I drank my Ural water religiously.
On Tuesday a man next to me had apple wedged in his chest.
He wanted emergency surgery.
The nurse gave him Gaviscon.
On Tuesday Rage was playing in the ER
On Tuesday Rage played a lot of Weird Al Yankovich
I remember listening to a lot of Weird Al on my brother’s iPod in 2009.
Dancing in my family’s front garden with a suburban dog confusedly following step.
At 3 am a doctor saw me.
Any chance you might be pregnant?
I used protection.
How many sexual partners have you had?
Two in the last month, before that one for four years.
Let me press on your stomach. Does it hurt here?
Yes
I’ll be back.
He was young and kind and awkward.
At 3:30 they took a blood test.
At 4 am the Doctor inserted three fingers to check my vaginal walls.
No tears.
No imperfections.
A perfect vaginal wall.
At 4:15 they inserted a plastic torch into my cervix.
The Junior Doctor made me welp in pain.
The Senior Doctor found my cervix with more ease.
I thought I ought to be more aloof and inaccessible, much like my cervix.
They pulled it out covered in blood.
Are these herpes blisters?
They are ingrown hairs.
What about this one?
That is also an ingrown hair.
How common is it to get herpes while having sex with someone with a condom and no symptoms?
You don’t have herpes.
At 5 am I did another blood test.
That arm bruised.
On Wednesday I was discharged.
They called it a cyst accident.
They thought maybe I had a big egg that month.
A big egg.
On Wednesday I slept until 1.
I tried to get an extension on my assignment.
It was denied.
Now the university knows about my post-coital cyst accident for no fucking reason.
On Wednesday I went to work.
They called it a cyst accident.
You know what that’s from? Not enough lubricant.
My co-worker said to me as we sat on milk crates in the back lane, smoking illegally imported Nanjin Slims as though it were a healthy choice.
On Wednesday they let me go home early.
I walked to Elizabeth’s Book Shop.
That guy that owns it is kind of fit.
I bought a book on motorcycles and another on homemaking.
On Wednesday night I bought doilies on Etsy.
On Wednesday I looked at my room and finally found the urge to nest.
On Wednesday I went to sleep listening to music on my new speaker.
It was becoming my new romantic partner.
Giving me the tensionless words and advice I yearned for.
On Thursday I went to a book launch for my assignment.
An old lady thanked me for coming for I was the only person she didn’t know.
On Thursday I stole a glass of pinot grigio from an old lady’s book launch and left.
On Thursday I called two friends.
They said I was manic.
I mean,
I am bipolar.
On Thursday my boyfriend responded to me.
He pleaded me to not do it.
On Thursday a mysterious German girl liked an Instagram photo from March.
It was September.
I guess he’s in Berlin.
The notification disappeared,
But the deep like never goes unnoticed, does it?
It’s one of those very online lies we tell ourselves.
Or we’ll just fester with shame at our Foucauldian impulses.
On Thursday I lay face down on my roommate’s bed.
On Thursday I sat in the bath, vaped, drank wine and read the copy of Debris mag I bought waiting at the failed book launch.
On Thursday I heard my neighbour through my bathroom window.
He was talking about Milf Manor and Freud.
I thought I might bootleg his off the cuff thesis.
On Thursday I lay in bed and listened to music on my new speaker and stared at the ceiling.
I saw mould; it was nice.
I hadn’t sat and listened to music as an isolated activity since puberty ridden afternoons of 2014 where I was enamoured by dust-speckles floating in summer evening sun.
Where in the expanse of my tiny bedroom I gorged on anticipated feelings and let one stolen cigarette from my father make me queasy.
Where I watched the full-length version of Reality Bites on YouTube over and over until one day it was gone.
Is there anything sweeter than a movie to oneself?
I shared too many important ones.
Why had I substituted that with fruitless attempts at communication?
Half-understandings and lazy mornings I could have written?
Because I loved each of those mornings;
Of kisses and lethargy.
And I felt accomplished by achieving that meagre half.
It’s Friday and I’m still bleeding.
It’s Friday and I’m writing.
It’s Friday and I didn’t feel lonely in ER.
I enjoyed ER.
It was my own.
An emergency room of one’s own.
A woman needs a cyst accident & and an emergency room to write.
I’m certain that is what Virginia Woolf would mean if she were here now.
Or she’s writhing in her grave at the state of post-feminism.
It’s Friday and if it wasn’t for everything I wouldn’t have listened to Ocean by Velvet Underground for the first time.
My roommate said he thought maybe I was dead in my room when he heard it bleeding out my door frame.
Much like the smoke on the Loaded record cover.
How funny.
I was so happy.
Albeit, catatonic.
It’s Friday and I need to do my assignment.
It’s Friday and I don’t have Herpes.
Just a big egg.