The Other Side of the World

because today is Bach’s concerto for two violins on repeat, hand-knit socks, chicken soup -
and this is what you do for some vitamin D in mid-february-canada

Four months of sweet, tumultuous, time-blurred mundane perfection. If I was more prone to be less cerebral, I’d spend my days with a blissful grin plastered on my face, expressing my joy and contentedness out loud. However, since such acts would likely cause me to disown myself – not mention bewilder the people around me, I will stick to measured bursts of syrup en ecrire. So, time has passed, the idea of a complete person inhabiting my innards becomes more and more impossible to contemplate, and is replaced by a sense of wonderment that a shiny little love-nut has managed to implant in the universe, like an overnight cherry-tree-blossoming or a sudden thunder storm. How, I have to ask, does one sit down, ever, and write what is termed a ‘birth story’? How to ever make a sheaf of words into something explanatory, descriptive, memorable – when the very thing it puports to discuss is still being lived, breathed, absorbed and fragmented. With every bright and succulent day.

I fell asleep last night in my usual way – with a baby suctioned firmly to my nipple. Five hours later I woke up in the exact same situation with those little lips determinedly pulsing away. I felt like I’d spent my night in a Saharan noon. It was all I could do to stagger out of bed and throw my face into the nearest container of water – a cup in the hallway that has been there who-knows-how-long. Dehydration, the new love.

Strange; that those membranes, clots of flesh and delicate filters – fibred and affixed themselves together while I dizzily wandered through gestation – through the bitter-iced winter and the sharp-sunned summer, the curdled damp winter and the amorphous humid-massed summer. Two continents – 9 months – go figure.
So what shall I do with my placenta? No ancestral land (without the impossible human-remain import laws, anyway) in which to bury it . . . it remains solid, irreverently squeezed between the plentifully hoarded meat cuts of my mother’s freezer.
When spring – finally, that misplaced season – arrives . . . let it melt into dark-earthed oblivion, twisting veins collapsing into hard-wire tree roots?
Which roots where?
With which roots shall I share my blood, my viscous, jellied crimson-purple, careful child-holding, vital and disposable -
my anatomy?