Everything begins, and ends, with a look.

When my father decided to leave us for reasons I have yet to figure out, he threw me a long, hard look (and another to my hysterical mother).

Then, when my ex-fianc*, Krisna, told me he was gay and therefore had to dump me a month before we were supposed to take our wedding vows, he took my hand in his and looked into my eyes for what seemed an eternity; and, two months after that, when I sat beside him at our favorite caf*, a test pack in one hand, a glass of ginger ale in the other, I didn't have to say anything - I simply looked at him, closely, until he burst into tears.

I'm almost certain now that some of the greatest and most disastrous events in human history involved some kind of look, because therein lies the projection of truth betrayed, of things unseen and of words unspoken.

They even say a look can kill.

One lazy afternoon, Krisna rang me from the nineteenth floor of an office tower on Sudirman Street to ask how I was feeling. I had been doing nothing but eating greasy food and watching television all day, so I sat up in bed, cleared my throat and said, "Exhausted."

"Really?" - I pictured him in his tiny cubicle, pretending to work, while everyone else around him was busy making a living - "What did you do?"

"I helped my mother bake a chocolate cake," I lied.

"You should be resting," he said tenderly, the way husbands are tender when talking to their pregnant wives. "Don't overwork yourself."

"I can't believe you're gay," I said, biting the edges of my hair.

"Tri - "

"Were you thinking of anyone I know when we screwed?" - I had to ask

"Don't do this," he pleaded. "I have agreed to support our child."

"It's not a child," I said, ripping out a strand of gray hair. "At least, not yet. Right now it looks like a lump covered in goo."

"A lump we should name," he whispered into the phone. "I vote for Christina."

"I hate that name. I watch Grey's Anatomy: she's a heartless bitch."

"Oh, come on!" He raised his voice, irritated now.

"Were you thinking of anyone I know when we screwed?"

There was a long silence on his end. I concentrated on the day we decided not to be virgins anymore. We were sitting on a bench, eating baked fishcakes from a plastic container, while staring at sailboats drifting off into the blue water. He talked about the times he spent on the same beach with his parents, years ago when he was younger, and he said he once saw a man running naked with both arms raised in the air, screaming, "I win!"

"What did he win?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I didn't ask."

"You should have asked," I said. "If I were you I'd want to know."

"I'm horny."

I turned to him. I should have seen it then, should have made the connection between the crazy naked guy and his horniness, but instead, I reciprocated with an invite. I swallowed what was left of the fishcake in my mouth, and pointed to a hotel behind us. He gave me a look. And that was that.

My best friend, Yulia, asked me - a day later, when, out of my own indiscretion regarding the "sex episode", she insisted on interrogating me in my own home - how I knew Krisna was a virgin before I let him devirginize me. Wasn't it possible he had lost his virginity to some other girl before I gave him the honor of stealing my carnal treasure?

I cringed at the phrase, "carnal treasure". It made me feel as though I had confiscated a trunk of mythical gold coins from a group of pirates, hidden it in my body and offered it to Krisna.

I told her what happened: how he came inside me, how he wept the second he came, how he held me for 20 minutes and thanked me profusely for trusting him enough to be "my first", how I reminded him of his mother. Yulia choked on a piece of chicken she had had in her mouth the entire time I was telling her the story.

"His what?" she asked.

"It was a compliment, really," I reasoned. "His mother is a very, very beautiful woman."

Yulia didn't understand how it could have been a compliment. I should have seen it then, too. The signs, apparently, were everywhere, and I missed them all.

"I don't want to talk about it," Krisna said, finally breaking the silence. He tapped his fingers on the desk, rhythmically, as he spoke, so I could hear the "tap, tap, tap" down the line.

When we were going out, he used to do the same thing and asked me to imagine they were the sounds of a thousand horses galloping across the horizon. I imagined his fingers, instead - yellow from holding too many cigarettes.

"I really don't want to talk about it," he repeated, as if I hadn't heard him the first time. As if the pregnancy had affected my hearing.

"Well, I do," I said. "I want to know."

"What about Lukas?"

"I don't want to give birth to a boy."

"You don't really have a choice."

"If it turns out to be a boy, you should raise him."

"Seriously?" I could hear the hope in his voice. "You would let me do that?"

"No."

"Tri-"

"Listen, I don't have time for this. Are you going to answer my question or not?"

"What question?"

I hung up on him, unplugged the phone and turned up the volume on the television set as loud as it was mechanically possible. I thought of him redialing my number, tapping his fingers harder, faster, and his colleagues lurking behind their computer screens, partitions, stacks of documents.

Krisna doesn't like being hung up on, and - because he works as a telemarketer - he hates his job more than anything else. Perhaps, even more than me - his ex-fianc*e-slash-soon-to-be-mother-of-his-child.

I want to be a good mother. Sometimes, I see myself as the mother of every living creature on earth. Watching back-to-back programs on Discovery Channel has aroused my maternal instincts to a whole new level, and I weep each time I catch an episode of Blue Planet, where a mother whale escorts a baby whale halfway across the world for months on end to a feeding ground in the South Pole.

I think of the things mothers do for their children, beginning with labor - all the pushing and breathing and dilating and contracting, believing there is no other pain quite like the pain of childbirth, waiting for life to slide out of the most sacred part of their body and send them a signal, a beacon, to tell them they have done a great job, they can rest now, a miracle has taken place.

My mother told me that when I was born, I had forgotten to cry. So, at the clinic, she lay on a bed with blood pooling between her legs, her breasts swollen and sore, thinking she had given birth to death, instead of life.

Whatever strength she had left was summoned to perpetuate a scream that sounded as though it had come from a beast, a scream that only a woman who had given birth to death would understand. But the midwife eventually walked to her side, touched her arm and gave her a look. It was then my mother knew I had survived.

Each night, before I go to bed, I stand in front of the mirror and stare at my own reflection. Rubbing the top of my belly, I think of that lump covered in goo, which will someday look back at me with disdain, regret and perhaps even love, if it thought I deserved it.

I think of the moment I will hold it in my arms, look searchingly into its eyes and find pieces of myself there.

It will ask me questions I have no answers to, and it will judge me before it gets to know me. It will stand before me, just as I stand before myself now, and look at me. I mean, really look at me.

And the look will say: Where have you been?

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