I once heard a woman say that immediately upon finding out, she’d felt the dawning of a strange inner power. It seemed as though she could undertake any task, could live through any hardship. This was a strength not of muscles, the woman said, but of light. In this new form of herself, she felt more alive than she ever had before.

She was recounting all this once it was already over, after she’d had an abortion, but her memory of that brief experience was still tinted by her encounter with what she now believed to be immortality.

The woman’s story stayed with me, and I thought about her words when I myself found out, searching my body and mind for signs of my own power. I can’t say that I felt it, not in the way that the woman had described, but I certainly sensed a shift, as if I’d entered a different dimension and would from then on inhabit two worlds at once: one steady and flat, and the other mysterious, with depths I could not yet fathom but knew were there.