What was I before I knew how to breathe?
Before I knew what it was to inhale fresh air, rather than swilling around gestational fluid from my mother’s amniotic sac.
To smell, to taste, to touch. To know where I ended and the rest of the world began. Apart from one long umbilical chord, a maternal link now signified through my belly button in the absence of any tangible string.
How each of my limbs fit together like dry stone. Despite creaking, crackage and breaks - somehow inexplicably - I am myself.
Behind that cell wall I was once something static, something other than this gangly collection of flesh and teeth and opinions I am now at twenty-one. Not that you’d realise that, of course, now I’m back in the womb of pre-adulthood that is my childhood home.
When they announced the lockdown, I just thought it would be a few weeks of lying serenely low in an unseasonably warm Easter. We all thought that over here. Even when the extension got announced it was just a postponement of summer, of going back to my friends and all the crap that comes from growing up. Truth be told, I enjoyed walking the beaches of my little sandy locale without any tourists around.
But as the days grow ever-longer I find myself floating in stasis, no longer an embryo yet sans-autonomy when it comes to growth. I’m just waiting for life to begin. Again.
They say no man is an island, but it feels like this girl-woman is one unto herself.
In absence of a life, I created a small oasis of my own, floating permanently around its perimeters until the adults come and rescue me. Piggy and the conch are doing well by the way. Turns out if you put some sensible girl-women adrift, we’ll find some way of keeping ourselves together. Just about.
This is my island. Welcome. I know its lines, its crevices, the pull of the waves and cycle of the sea. It is both peaceful and mine and - exceedingly comfortable with my own company as always - I am perfectly content in isolation most of the time. Can you imagine how I float?
I’m ever on the lookout for castaways, though. I’ve always been dead good at looking after people, so even if you swallow water on your way to me I’m sure I could still bring you back to life. Or maybe that’s just a god complex thing on my part. Can you blame me though? When you’re the only person you’ve got to talk to, it’s very easy to make yourself bigger than all humanity.
Or is that just immaturity? They say the brain doesn’t finish developing until you’re twenty five. Thank God. I’d hate to be this forever. But if it’s true that I came out into the world underdone then maybe it’s appropriate for me to be back in the metaphorical womb.
Soon I’m sure they will give a signal that I can go back outside and, with mask and hand san in tow, I can be a homo sapien human again
I’ll get to see my friends. Laugh. Cruise through waves or recollection and reconnection.
A thought often crashes in though, a wave of doubt that even when I reconnect with those I love, they’ll still never be in my lane. That I’ll always float separately from them, this un-relatable lonely rainbow fish who won’t ever escape her island after this long period of isolation.
I forgot how to read faces last month, how to mirror hand-movements and fake normality the month before. And so now I’m wondering if this is the only place I can ever be. I write this in a note to myself, and place it out into the internet via an anonymous forum. I get told to work on my confidence. As if I’m not trying.
Maybe it’s something I can use the next few months for though, I think as I search up a self-help guide on the internet. But as I’m about to click on the first link that’s not an ad, my touch gets blocked by a pop-up banner.
A newsflash comes up on my phone, my telly, my brain. It’s time to go outside again.
Too soon, I think, too soon, a few days later as I put on big girl boots too large for me by far.
My parents hug me goodbye, and cry as they hand me a suitcase and their expectations all in one hand.
I am shoved back into the real world, come crashing back to reality.
And then I am birthed.
Comments