This is how it began...

[I wish I could say that I now no longer have to live with the isolation that I described in this piece, the isolation that I felt when I wrote it, but that would be a lie.]

"THE INCUBATOR"

Copyright 2001

There is a connection between the loneliness I feel now and what I must have felt as a baby in the incubator. I realized that newborn babies have no sense of time whatsoever. Three days must have seemed like three lifetimes and then some. With no awareness of the events that break up time, that separate day from night, hour from minute. No knowledge that care continues. Each feed the first and last, each brief physical contact the only one in a lifetime. And always the desperate aloneness that stretches for eternity, the panic that there is something that I desperately need, that I cannot put into words and ask for. And now I know that because I never had it then, now I can never really have it at all. So the loneliness that I feel now echoes what I felt them, and seems to stretch beyond time, and will never end. But I don't know how it is possible that I have survived this, what I went through when I was younger, and what I am still enduring. I don't think that any human being should have to go through life feeling this fundamental lack, this emptiness.

Enclosed in a bubble like a bug caught in amber, trapped and at the mercy of those whose power far outweighed mine. They had the power over life and death, survival and ..... The only power I had was that of resistance. I could resist their insistence on my lack of value, resist their doom laden proclamations of a worthless life, nothing more than a vegetable (and I always wanted to know - what kind of a vegetable? Carrot, cauliflower, cabbage - what?), and fated to be inferior in thought, feeling, movement. I resisted their expectations that I would lie placid and accepting of whatever they did to me. Scooting endlessly up and down, up and down, testing out the confines of this plastic bubble they condemned me to. I pulled out the wires and needles attached to me, these insulting non-human things that were meant to help me live. I knew I could live without those substitutes for reality. They say that the nurses could never keep a nappy on me, I moved around so much. So I crawled up and down endlessly through my own shit, the only thing in the silence that was me, that was real and human, and didn't beep and hum and pour chemicals into me. I was the one who was in control and I showed it. The nurses nicknamed me `the little abortion'. Three months too early, and very inconvenient.