NOTIONS OF THE SACRED

AYŞEGÜL SAVAŞ

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.

The day I confirmed the news, I had taken a test and gone for a checkup, too. A stroke of luck found me an obstetrician who was available to see me that same afternoon. She conducted a scan and told me that everything looked good. I left her office feeling elated.

On a whim, I entered a shop and bought a felt hat, wide-rimmed and peacock green. It was impractical, more costume than accessory, but I wanted to mark the day somehow-my entry into the new dimension.

As I walked down the street wearing the hat, I saw people glancing at me, and I beamed at them full of my own mystery, like a benevolence. I thought of the face of the Virgin Mother in scenes of the Annunciation, and had a new understanding of her inward gaze, at once present and far away.