Beginning
BIRTH
I’ve never imagined or bothered, really, to seek out and piece together the story of my birth. The material elements have never felt urgent, though I do know, by then, my parents were no longer in love, and I do know that someone arrived at the hospital with baby’s breath, because flattened on the first page of my photo album, is a dried stem, gently curved beside a photo of my pink, wrinkled face – so new to the world that my face looks raw, helpless and incomplete, as though my face was meant to, over time, grow a sleek coat of fur, whiskers, too, as though my mother gave birth to a puppy, not a person. The way puppies, who are born functionally blind and deaf, come out with their eyes clenched, their canals closed.