james ward
I wanted desperately to cling to that Wednesday, to dig my nails into the W and maybe slide down to the D, but that was as far as I was going, just to be safe. No midnight had ever seemed quite so disfigured, so unnatural in its open eyed zeros. They were staring me down to my tanned flesh and farther, and the horror went beyond the embarrassment of standing nude before such a minute-long acquaintance. It was the fear of looking down to acknowledge the heart itself and another year that it had beat out. I wanted to hide this.
It was a week until my seventeenth birthday, and there was no additional freedom that could ever have tricked me into wanting to be older. I knew why birthdays needed cakes, why I needed to be conditioned into loving them as a child at the center of parties and multicolor balloons. Because, if I hadn‘t been so busy feistily defending fallen candy from a busted donkey, I would have realized what had just happened-- Though all day I was given things wrapped in impressive paper, I’d lost something else entirely, something immeasurably more significant though considerably less shiny. Life.
So when I realized this, I began to treat all the years of it as my children, and fight with all of myself to hold onto each one. It was a maternal instinct from birth. But I always lost. And every year, celebrations were truly in consolation. They were wakes for something, someone that had passed on.
I closed tight my eyelids and my sheets because I knew what was coming.
I held onto my little infant embodying life as tightly as I could.
So they drugged my inhibitions and wheeled me into a bright white room on a steel table. And out of my womb, through the lack of umbilical, they stole my baby.
Now here I am mourning again. My 17th kid. My appendix.
It was a week until my seventeenth birthday, and there was no additional freedom that could ever have tricked me into wanting to be older. I knew why birthdays needed cakes, why I needed to be conditioned into loving them as a child at the center of parties and multicolor balloons. Because, if I hadn‘t been so busy feistily defending fallen candy from a busted donkey, I would have realized what had just happened-- Though all day I was given things wrapped in impressive paper, I’d lost something else entirely, something immeasurably more significant though considerably less shiny. Life.
So when I realized this, I began to treat all the years of it as my children, and fight with all of myself to hold onto each one. It was a maternal instinct from birth. But I always lost. And every year, celebrations were truly in consolation. They were wakes for something, someone that had passed on.
I closed tight my eyelids and my sheets because I knew what was coming.
I held onto my little infant embodying life as tightly as I could.
So they drugged my inhibitions and wheeled me into a bright white room on a steel table. And out of my womb, through the lack of umbilical, they stole my baby.
Now here I am mourning again. My 17th kid. My appendix.