Before the Breaking

"Sometimes I wonder if Mama feels me listening. If she does, I hope she knows—I’m already here, waiting for her to see me."

There is warmth. There has always been warmth.

I do not know where the warmth ends and I begin. Perhaps there is no difference. Perhaps I am the warmth, and the warmth is me, and we have always been this single thing suspended in thick, sweet darkness.

The drumbeat lives above me. Thum-thump, thum-thump, thum-thump. It is the first sound, the only sound, the sound that was here before I knew that sounds existed. Sometimes it runs fast like water rushing—those times taste sharp and bright through the cord that feeds me. Sometimes it slows to something deep and rolling, and those times taste like the colour I cannot see but somehow know: a deep, warm red that pulses through everything.

I float. I have always been floating. The thick darkness holds me like hands I cannot feel, cradling me in a ocean that moves when I move, that breathes when she breathes, that is never still but never violent. I tumble slowly, endlessly, my fingers finding my mouth, my feet pressing against walls that yield and press back, soft as whispers.

When I swallow, the taste is sweet and alive. It carries something of her through me—her calm, her quiet, the steady rhythm of her existence flowing into mine through the rope of flesh that binds us. I do not know what hunger is because I have never been empty. I do not know what loneliness is because I have never been alone.

The pushing comes in waves. Gentle squeezing that wraps around me like an embrace, holds me close, then releases. Holds me, then releases. This is the rhythm beneath the rhythm, the great slow pulse of the darkness itself contracting and expanding like breath. This is good. This is how it has always been. This is the only way of being I have ever known.

I am growing. I can feel it in the way the walls press closer now, the way my elbows find resistance where once there was only yielding space. Soon—though I do not know what soon means—something will change. I feel it in the restlessness that moves through her, in the way her drumbeat quickens sometimes for no reason I can taste, in the strange tightening that ripples through my ocean more frequently now.

But I am not afraid. Fear is a thing I have not yet learned.

Until now.

The taste changes first.

Sharp. Bitter. Wrong. Like metal flooding through the cord though I do not know what metal is. Like lightning though I have never seen the sky. The sweetness curdles into something acrid that burns through my throat, my belly, my blood. I try to turn away from it but there is nowhere to turn. It is everywhere. It is her.

The drumbeat above me shatters its rhythm.

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump—

Too fast. Too hard. The steady pulse that has been my entire universe stammers and races, a wild animal fleeing from something I cannot see. The vibration of it shudders through my liquid world, through my soft bones, through the tender membrane of my skull.

The walls clench.

Not the gentle squeeze I know. This is violent. Sudden. The darkness crushes inward and I am compressed, my arms pinned against my chest, my face pressed into my knees. The pressure builds and builds until I am nothing but a thing being wrung out, twisted, crushed—

Then it releases. I gasp fluid into my lungs, my whole body shuddering with the shock of it.

Another clench. Harder. Faster. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Sounds pierce through the walls of my world. I have heard sounds before—muffled music, the low rumble of a voice that is not hers, the distant hum of the world beyond. But these sounds are different. These sounds are sharp as the taste in my mouth. They are loud. They are harsh. They scrape against my liquid cocoon like claws.

Screaming. I do not know the word but I know the shape of it, the ragged tearing quality that rips through the barrier between her world and mine. Her screaming. Something is making her scream.

The drumbeat stumbles. Skips. Races faster than I have ever felt it race.

Through the cord, her terror floods into me. It has a taste—copper and salt and something burnt. It has a texture—jagged, electric, sharp as broken glass. My whole body seizes with a fear that is not mine but becomes mine, that pours through the rope of flesh connecting us and fills me with the knowledge that something terrible is happening.

I try to curl smaller. I pull my knees to my chest, wrap my arms around my head, make myself as tiny as I can. But there is nowhere to hide. This darkness that has been my sanctuary offers no protection. Her fear is my fear. Her pain is my pain. We are one creature, she and I, and the creature is being torn apart.

A sound like ending.

I feel it more than hear it—a violence that shudders through the walls of my world, a wrongness so profound that my unborn heart stumbles in its rhythm. Something has happened. Something has broken.

The screaming stops.

The silence is worse.

Her drumbeat—the song that has been my constant companion since before I knew that I existed—wavers. Slows. The racing terror rhythm drops into something sluggish, something struggling, something that sounds like drowning.

Thum... thump... thum... thump...

The ocean around me changes. The warmth begins to drain. I feel it leaving—the thick, sweet darkness growing thinner, the pressure shifting, the buoyancy that has held me floating all these months abandoning me to a gravity I have never felt before.

I am sinking.

Something is leaking out of my world.

Voices pierce through now—sharp, urgent, unfamiliar. Not her voice. Other voices. Many voices. They bark sounds I cannot understand but that feel like alarm, like emergency, like hurry.

The walls clench again but differently. Something presses from the outside. Something hard and foreign. The boundary of my universe—the soft, yielding membrane that has been sky and earth and everything—bends inward under pressure that does not belong.

Then—

Light.

It tears through the wall of my world. Not from below where the passage waits, the narrow canal I was meant to travel through, but from above. From somewhere that should never open. A wound ripped through the sky of my existence.

The light is violence. The light is a blade. It cuts through the darkness that has been my only home and I recoil from it, my eyes sealed shut but somehow still burning, still seared by this terrible brightness that was never meant to find me here.

Cold rushes in.

I have never known cold. I have only known warmth, only known the perfect temperature of her body wrapped around mine. But now the cold comes flooding through the wound in my world, and it is like dying. It is like the opposite of everything I have ever been.

My ocean drains away. The thick fluid that has cushioned me, held me, fed me, becomes thin and rushing, pouring out through the gash above me. I feel myself settling, falling, the buoyancy gone, gravity claiming me for the first time.

The cord between us pulls tight.

She is leaving me. Going somewhere I cannot follow. Her drumbeat grows distant, muffled, fading like a voice calling from the far end of a long corridor. I reach for it with something that is not hands but need, desperate need, the only connection I have ever known slipping away.

Thum... thump...

Thum...

Hands that are not hers touch me.

They are cold. Hard. Covered in something slick that is not the fluid of my home. They grip my head—my soft, unfinished skull—and they pull.

I do not want to go. I want to stay in the darkness, in the warmth, in the place where her heartbeat lives. But the hands are stronger than my wanting. They pull me upward, through the wound, through the gash that was torn in the only world I have ever known.

The cold takes me.

The light blinds me.

The sound—the sound is everywhere, no longer muffled by water and flesh but raw and immediate and screaming into my newborn ears.

I am outside.

I am separate.

I am wrong.

The cord is cut.

I feel it like an amputation. One moment I am still connected—still part of her, still fed by her blood, still bound to the drumbeat that is fading, fading, fading somewhere far away. The next moment, there is nothing. A snip. A severance. The rope of flesh that has been my lifeline becomes a useless stump, and I am alone in a way I have never been alone.

I scream. The sound that tears out of me is not a cry but a howl—a raw, animal protest that my tiny lungs cannot contain. I scream for the warmth that is gone. I scream for the drumbeat that has abandoned me. I scream for the world that has been ripped open and can never be closed again.

This is my first knowing: I came through breaking, not through birth.

This is my first feeling: I was pushed out by fear, not by love.

This is my first truth: Something went wrong, and I am the wrong thing that happened.

I do not know these thoughts as thoughts. I know them as feelings that live in my new-breathing lungs, in my new-beating heart that beats alone now, without her drumbeat above it.

I am here.

I am separate.

I am wrong.