Chapter Text
2024
Ultimately, it’s the seizure that makes everything crumble.
For ten and a half years, Baran’s life was in control.
There had been only three hours when she lost that control, three hours of her life that she tries never to think about. Baran doesn’t think about the hours she spent hiding under a bed while armed men shot her patients, the hours hiding, trying to stifle her own terrified cries, and wishing she believed in a god to pray to.
Baran had been in control after the attack though. She’d tended to the wounded though her husband had been there insisting that she was in shock, that she needed to stop, that other people could take over. They were her patients. She hadn’t saved the women and babies lying in that hospital dead. She could keep working. She could stabilize the injured. Everyone else there was a midwife or nurse. She was the only one trained to take care of gunshot wounds.
She stayed in control in the months after when her husband suggested they leave Afghanistan early and Baran refused. They finished their year in Kabul before moving to Pittsburg to be close to Ahmad’s family. From there everything went as planned. She took a job at the VA. She got pregnant a few months later.
Two years ago, Baran gave birth to her perfect baby boy. When her seizures didn’t return despite changing medications prior to pregnancy and despite the months of sleep deprivation after Babak was born, Baran had believed that she was really cured.
Ten years she went without a seizure, ten years that she drove and used the stove and bathed her baby without fear.
And then everything fell apart.
Babak is two and Baran is terrified to hold him or bathe him, terrified that her body will betray her and she will hurt her child.
Her body has betrayed her since she was a five.
This betrayal, the seizure she had three months ago that Baran thinks about nearly every waking moment, reminds her of her body’s other great betrayal.
She was eleven when she heard classmates talking about masturbation, eleven when she used the slow dial up internet on her home computer to look up what that meant and how to do it. She was eleven the first time she made herself come, and she was eleven when she realized that she always thought about women when she touched herself.
She tried to put the thought from her mind, but just like her body betrayed her still every few months with another seizure, it betrayed her in those teenage years with an ache between her legs that only went away when she touched herself. She looked at pictures sometimes, read stories on that same slow computer. Always women. It meant nothing. She’d never had sex then so why should she think about a male body when she’d never seen one.
In college she slept with her first boyfriend. It wasn’t bad. The sex felt good. Her body responded like it was supposed to. So she couldn’t be gay. If she was she wouldn’t have come during sex with a man.
But now as Baran watches her husband, the kind, attractive man that she’s been with for years, get undressed for bed, she thinks she’s never really been attracted to him. The sex had felt good in the beginning, and it meant nothing if she’d pictured women during it, thought of the sound of women moaning, the sound of porn imprinted in her mind and played over the sounds her husband made.
Baran has a good life. She grew up to be the kind of woman her parents could be proud of, a woman who proved that the long years they devoted to seeking out the best epileptologists and watching her constantly to make sure she didn’t hurt herself when she was young and she’d still had tonic-clonic seizures, were worth it. She’d been so much work as a child, needed so much.
As an adult she tried to never need anything. She was quietly perfect. She got into Stanford for med school and stayed for residency. She married the kind pediatrics resident she met during residency. She joined MSF with him. She made her life mean something. She made her survival mean something.
Baran tries not to think about how close she came to dying as a child. She put it from mind for years. But now she feels like the seizure has cracked her open, taken away the perfect control she had begun to believe in.
Now she can’t stop thinking about how she nearly didn’t get to grow up. She can’t stop thinking about how she nearly didn’t make it home from Kabul. She can’t stop staring at Babak while he sleeps and thinking how life is so fragile and he could be taken from her. Life is so short. People die. Children die. Baran can’t stop thinking about how short life is, can’t stop thinking about how she is on her third chance now.
Her life is good. She has a home, a husband who is kind and patient even as she pulls away, a good career, a son she loves who should be her whole life, who should make her want nothing more.
“Please talk to me,” Ahmad says when he gets into bed. He’s wearing only his underwear, and Baran knows she should feel something. He’s in good shape. He’s attractive. Looking at his chest and his arms and his beautiful, kind smile should make her want him.
Ahmad gets under the blanket, puts his hand on Baran’s hip, and she recoils from his touch. He didn’t even ask to have sex, she chides herself. He’s been so patient. “Baran.” His voice is soft. “I told you I wouldn’t pressure you.”
She hasn’t let him touch her in months. She hasn’t wanted him to touch her in years. Not truly. Not him. It had become like those early years when she figured out how to touch herself, just something to get rid of the ache, her eyes closed, a fantasy in her head every time, a different body, a different moan. It worked. Her body was able to get what it needed.
After the seizure, when it felt like something broke in Baran, when she felt like her whole life spiraled out of control, she thinks this broke too. Life is so short, and she isn’t sure she can spend it like this any longer.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” Ahmad asks. “Have I not proven myself worthy of your trust? You told me that you didn’t want to have sex, and we haven’t. You promised to discuss it with Dr. Fairgrave.” She had promised, insisted that this was a side effect since increasing her dose of levetiracetam.
She knows it isn’t. She knows she just can’t bring herself to pretend any longer. Her body won’t stop betraying her, won’t stop losing control. “I don’t want to talk about this again tonight.” Baran rolls over and stares at the photo on the wall of her, Ahmad, and Babak when he was a baby. They look like the perfect family.
“You won’t even let me hold you,” Ahmad says. “You won’t talk to me. I know this is hard for you, and I just want to help. I’m your husband.”
Baran’s chest feels tight, and she feels like she’s suffocating. She doesn’t know if she can spend the rest of her life like this. She’s a coward. She’s been a coward for years. She doesn’t know when she figured it out. She hadn’t fully admitted the thought to herself until after the seizure, until after her perfect life shattered, until the thought that life is short and precious and she’s spent hers hiding had lodged itself in her mind and refused to leave. She can’t look at Ahmad. He’s a good man and a good father. He deserves better.
Baran’s heart hammers in her chest and she struggles for air to force the words out. “I think I’m gay.”