An Introduction

repost | much like the earth, I am mostly water.

An Introduction

Much like the earth, I am mostly water.
Inside me, there are more microbial cells than human cells, or so says
the book I am reading. Like you, I have always been more Other
than Self. But still, the mythology of I persists. I am this
and that, I like to say. I am good at making pictures in my head
and bad at parking cars. I am scared of old elevators, looking down
from high places and being late for anything. In fact, I was born
early. It was noon on a Thursday, two weeks early, when I cried
for the first time. My voice fragile and enormous, telling this new world:
I am here, I am here. Later when I was twelve, I was stung
by a wasp on the index finger. The pain was tremendous, the insect’s way of
telling me: I am here, I am here. My arm turned hot and tender, puffed
up till my elbow. The wasp twitched on the ground and died.
That day I learnt that I was porous. That every living thing
exists at the mercy of one another. That day, because I was frightened
I refused to cry. I allowed not even a whimper, as the sullen school nurse
pulled the barbed stinger out of my finger. That day, I knew what I wanted;
to become fortress instead of flesh, to turn into a place
where nothing ever passed through. For years afterwards, I forgot
how to cry. Instead I walked around with a knot in my throat that no poem
could dissolve. I hated the saltwater of my skin until I lay down in the sea
and let it carry me. All my life, I have been afraid and unafraid.
Every place I go, I wonder if I arrived too late. Some nights
I hold that knot in the hollow of my throat like a baby bird,
and I tell her to go steady into the unbridled dark.
I tell her to cry out loud and say: I am here, I am here.

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