Rachel Chitofu
Harare, Zimbabwe

In the Harare gynecology clinic, the air is thick with antiseptic and held breath. For four women today, the womb is less a sanctuary and more a ledger of what has been lost or never allowed to begin.

​For the first woman with late-stage HPV, a cervix surrendered to malignancy. She did not just cry; she broke. For the second, not cancer but fibroids—yet the tears were the same. The difference between a benign mass and a malignant growth may be futile if both result in barrenness.

​The third woman was a study in surrender. She came with her daughter, wearing a lipstick that seemed to hold her face together. When the results were read, the hope vanished, and the pigment seemed to melt from her lips. She did not cry; she simply exhaled.

​Then there was the fourth woman—denial draped in the mundane. It was just warts, she insisted. Everybody back home has this. She could not understand the urgency, continued to smile into a lie, unaware of the metastases that had already formed.

​I think most of Jo, a thirty-year-old woman with five pedunculated fibroids who had waited to have a child because the “character ethic” of her village demanded a purity that has since cost her everything. To have been pregnant back home was to be labeled loose; to be barren now is to be discarded. In moments, the realization that her window of fertility slipped away added a decade to her face. I don’t want the man if there is no baby, she wailed. I don’t want myself.

​Is this the expectation of womanhood? To return to a sturdiness we never achieved, planting trees in hearts already full of ache? We toss our grief into rivers, fearing we might pollute the water, or pray to a heaven we are afraid to shatter with our tears. We are left with a pit too shallow to bury the sorrow, so we simply wear it until it becomes our skin.