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I know what it's like now to be in that womb all squashed especially my left arm, and she finds out, the woman who is me, the woman who is outside me, she learns that he is going to leave her. "I'm going to leave you." How can that be? This is impossible, for my husband my lover this gorgeous man to walk out on me; these things don't happen. My world isn't like this. Horrible things don't happen in my world. I'm a rich bitch. I was wild because I was protected - I could do anything - who was going to touch me - really touch me like those others, like those poor people in the world - are touched? My father is the kindest gentlest man in the world and being rich he was made the world! He is my protector. Nothing can happen here so it's cool if I run off with a wild white boy. And the boy's parents were rich. This fact, that the man to whom I've given myself and by whom I'm fucking pregnant does not compute.

She was raw, a kid, with all the faults of a kid so now all she felt was rage, unadulterated fury. She would kill. She would kill that baby in the womb. She knew why he was leaving her - it was that kid in my womb - she had never wanted one anyway - the doc, he was a quack, he must be a quack, told her that if she got pregnant she wouldn't have this pain in her abdomen - she hated pain because she was a beautiful kid. What did she want a brat since she was a brat? Get out here. Get rid of it. Get rid of him too; he was walking out on her; she loved and adored him so much she would never love again.

Understand I felt this, she was me and she wasn't me, I couldn't do anything about it and all the life was being sucked out of me. I felt, I was, her shock. There was no difference. I no longer existed and I hated myself for not existing. I became absence. I didn't exist before I was born and before that there was anger at her or at me, we are the same at the helplessness of youth that can only feel, that knows only anger as a response. Wild. Four months later when she tried to about me, I learned that I was hated and to hate myself, we were the same; most of all I hated myself for not busting out of that womb, not shoving my foot into the mucus membrane and there tearing a hole and emerging, emerging into light and woods, me American, because before her and him. I am a person who wants to live, I live to want to live, I sing with it, I am a creature meant for wildness transformed into joy.

Let me tell you what it was like in that womb. After my father walked out. Absence isn't absent; it's pain. Every part of me began to scream. Especially my belly which was my mother's belly, or I was my mother's belly. I no longer wanted food. I no longer wanted to move, to get out, my left shoulder which was what would first emerge from the womb began to scream, the shoulder was dislocated, how did it get dislocated: I was in a womb. The stomach, without food, and then the kidneys, for fluid no longer entered the base of the body. I grew as skinny as a rat though only of myself, sniffing, and looking for a way out, there's a scrap of food, descend into ratdom, the forest, all the fertle sniffing beasts. But I was weak, I could barely crawl. A rat no other rat wants. I hung out by the canal. I grew too weak to do more than crawl a few feet down its bank. 2 black cats were watching me. One day walking didn't ease the pain; it increased it; I couldn't barely get home. I thought, I don't want to live anymore. This thought, I thought, is anathema. Inside my house, I started to scream. I couldn't stop. Mucus poured out of my nose and mouth. I had been coughing convulsively for days. My body is a scream. This is what my birth is. They say the world is a vale of pain, but I don't believe that must be true. There is no need to live in pain to the extent that one is pain.

Daddy, this is what happened when you left me. I don't know who you and mommy are and it doesn't matter. With you, reality isn't bearable. It's time to forget you ever existed.

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