By Cheryl Chong

As a child, I was raised into both religion and regimentation. Worship sessions at my all-girls, Protestant missionary-founded school were a staple – involving standing, sitting, and the clasping of hands at specific points in time. Having memorised the Lord's Prayer at the age of seven, I could lead the family prayers every evening. At Sunday School, being observed and taught by teachers whose solemn expressions exemplified controlled, restrained piety, I held my tongue when a Sunday School classmate called me "ugly." Heading home by 8pm for the majority of my adolescence, I settled into a comfortable routine. I was a temple of order, my hands folded neatly in my lap, my chin-length bob tucked behind the collar of my uniform.

However, the body has little regard for liturgies. It was later that life started to spiral in other directions. Each month, I bled profusely. It would come in gushes and spurts, occasionally slowing to a trickle which however, would not stop completely. With each clot that fell out of me, I would wash and scour myself in the bathroom, a desperate baptism that offered no absolution.

I wore black as a disguise, and mourned for the rituals I had lost. For a few months, I said nothing. I had, after all, been trained in the discipline of silence, in the masking of discomfort behind a calm expression. I told myself it was an irregularity, the body adjusting to some strange rhythm, the way hymns sometimes shift their key mid-verse. I bought more black. I planned my days around public toilet routes that I had mentally mapped. I moved quietly through the world with a practised composure, while my abdomen sometimes clenched and churned.

There were moments when it ambushed me. Once, in the middle of a work meeting, I felt the familiar warm rush and excused myself. Standing in the toilet cubicle, I pressed my forehead against the partition and breathed deeply. The fluorescent light above hummed with bland indifference, while colleagues prattled outside. I had held my tongue over worse things than this. I could continue to hold it.

I did not know then that bodies do not negotiate. They make demands with a frequency and volume that cannot be prayed away. Having glimpsed the same tired face in the mirror above the toilet sink too many times, I found myself wondering when this would end. So, I made the appointment with a gynaecologist.

Her office was neat in the way I had once wanted to be. She had the demeanour of someone who had delivered difficult news so many times that kindness had become clinical. I sat across from her with my hands compliantly folded, while she showed me the ultrasound scan on her desktop computer. The fibroid was a smidge, barely visible to my untrained eye, yet its presence was confirmed like a court verdict.

She explained the procedure in precise, reassuring terms. Minimally invasive. One week of recovery. Then, almost as an afterthought, the words that I remembered after I had left:

"You'll still be able to bear children."

I smiled and nodded politely, but felt something small and stubborn rise within me. I had not asked her about children, or whether my womb would be able to fulfil its biological purpose in future. I had only asked to stop bleeding through my clothes, to stop racing to the nearest toilet, to stop waking at 2am in the morning to be startled by the metallic tang of wetness in my sheets. I could not see myself as fertile ground where fruit is borne.

Driving home alone, I realised that I had not told anyone where I was going.

The morning of the surgery, they dressed me in an oversized gown that could only be tied in the back. There is a peculiar vulnerability in being asked to surrender the small dignities - your belongings, the clothes that fit. Lying on the operating table, I could barely open my eyes to squint at the lights hovering above me, like a constellation of stars beckoning from another world.

I saw that the anaesthetist had kind eyes above her mask, when she handed me a form to sign. She told me to count to ten and I obeyed, like the girl who had always known how to follow instructions. One. Two. Three. I thought of the Lord's Prayer, the dinners that were opened with it, the way some words seemed to stick in my child's mouth, too grand for utterance. Thy will be done. Four. Five.

Then nothing.

When I awoke, it was slow, the way light returns after an eclipse. Pain came at a distance, like a muffled voice through a cipher machine. A nurse pressed a cup of water into my hands. I noticed that my hands continued trembling, and that no one had asked me to be still.

The first month after removal, it ebbed. Standing in the bathroom on a weekday, I understood that what I was seeing was simply the tepid movement of blood washed away by water. Nothing to be scrubbed.

I grieved a little, which surprised me. Not for the fibroid, but for the years spent working around it – the black wardrobe worn like armour, the work meetings I had left in a hurry, the mental labyrinth of public toilets, the overseas trips I had declined, my familiarity with the "Feminine Hygiene" aisle of the drugstore. The toll that went uncounted because it had been paid for with small daily trade-offs, organised to meet a body in revolt.

But grief and relief are not binary, and I was learning to hold more than one emotion at once. I could not return to the routine of my girlhood, or the stoic restraint performed for the teachers whose approval I had once longed for.

Sorting through my wardrobe one morning, I found a long-forgotten pastel dress shoved all the way at the back. It fit perfectly. I was reassembling myself again, in more colours than black.

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