Post Partum Pickle

[Muffit]

Birth. Surely the most traumatic experience in a person’s life – especially for the infant. Out of warm safe darkness into cold painful light. Nothing familiar at all – sight, sound, touch – all a quivering shock to a fragile nervous system, initiated heartlessly by the pain of induced crying by a world as strange as any alien landscape to innocent eyes.



Why do we, as a whole, not remember this moment? Why do we, each and every one, have no memory at all of nine long months of what would surely be the most intriguing story ever told? Time, like some overly-anxious highwayman, lies in wait for our first moment of life and steals that only fleeting symbiosis we will ever have.



Are you like me? Have you spent your whole brief life searching for that bond again? Looking desperately for that one person who shares your hopes and dreams, body and soul, someone who can be that safe darkness in the night when you share the cotton cocoon we wrap ourselves in, hoping the womb of evening will tie us by umbilical dreams to that heart lying beside you?



The shock of birth awakes me every morning, feeling separate and alone again, each day as though it were Murray’s livid Groundhog Day and Cher’s voice greets my secret tears. Love is but a five year cycle of wearing out someone’s heart and walking betwixt a row of used cars for the next, an aisle not of bridal fantasy but estimation and haggling, hoping for Ferraris and settling on Escorts. That disconsolate daybreak veils the stars we wish upon, and sunset slowly settles on our lives as we come to realize our one and only chance for romantic symbiosis wanes with each passing year.



First love is so much like first birth. It can only happen to you once. The tragedy of life is that our dreams must die to wear this crumbling armor that masks our soul from the eyes we long to look into. Like battered shores the waves of emotion that tide our lives leave naught but dust where rocks of granite hope once lay.



I cannot be as one with someone as the fetus I once was, cannot shroud my fears in tepid pools of infancy again, cannot share the beating of another’s heart. But if I can relive a cherished dream, I touch the magic time so long departed with senses bathed in amnesia’s tingling recollection. My words can only fail to express to you what seeing a simple, newborn scene of warriors and heroines from my treasured past would do for me. Galactica is not a spattering of colors on film, it is a beat of life’s first heart.


That is the moment I want so much to live again, because I cannot live it now.



Except in reverie.



Affectionately,
Muffit