I grew up in a place that always made me feel alien, and I was worried for a long time that it was my destiny to be outside of things, but moving here, I can see that isolation is self-made.
Birth, for example, is not lonely, though it is the first time you are not your mother. You spend months and months with her, swallowing and inhaling her, swimming in her belly, gestating on what is certain to be a difficult life. Sure, by the time you’re ready to leave, you have your own brain stem, your own spine, your own fingers and toes. Sure, the transformation into selfhood is violent! You cry on entry, with the fresh knowledge that the coming world is brighter and drier than you had expected, but these truths are only obvious because they’re painful.
What you don’t notice at birth:
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How soft your hair will smell
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How lovely the music you will make
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That music, how much it will change me
By the time you get here, your mother has been waiting nearly a year for you, eating your food for you, pissing your urine for you, spinning her silk into a cocoon of potential energy for the life you are about to live…How lovingly your mother’s body delivers you, to destroy itself like that.
She tears herself open just to let you out. She nearly dies granting you the knowledge that you were not alone when you got here, and how dare you say you say you have never belonged anywhere in light of all her labor? You are not born alone, you cannot be, and moreover, what you don’t know – cannot know – before you are born, is how long we have all been waiting for you.
On closer inspection, even the wretched spider crawling up my windowsill catches the porchlight behind it, for a few minutes incandescent, and wriggling its own little way to the same place we’re all going. I wonder if it can tell I’m here. When I’m horrible, I remind myself that it’s not a magic light; It doesn’t show you anything that isn’t already there. It bounces off of the truth of love, his segmented exoskeleton, containing everything he needs to eat, fuck and die.
My mom calls me once a week asking witchy/haunted questions: if I had been caught in the rain, or when I last had my blood checked. (She is keeping tabs on the fluid dynamics in my area?) I understand that it’s because she is the person who is the most acquainted with the metaphor of belonging – her body made mine inside of hers so that I too could eat and die, fuck if I’m lucky. She of all people knows most intimately, that I was not born alone. To her, it’s just a manifest truth.
I moved to New York City because I wasn’t sure if I belonged anywhere else, because I had forgotten that I’ve never been alone, because I always forget that I was never alone in this life. No one is. I made this blog to help myself remember (it’s really so shocking how easy it is to forget!)
We only have each other. All we have is each other. But think how lucky! We are! To have! Each other!