A Delayed Narration of My Birth on the Order of Twenty Four Years

A Delayed Narration of My Birth on the Order of Twenty Four Years

It is on a Monday that I listen
to my friend Michael, a med-school novice,
describe to me what he had that day seen:
I got to watch a C-Section performed,
he exclaimed, after passing wishes
of well-being on the afternoon of
my birth (though I was, so I’m told, born in
the evening hours, yet that as well
is imprecise, and probably unknown),
and I inform him that it was by this
method that I, as MacDuff, was not of
woman born, as my exit was poised to
happen feet first, entangling my neck
in the cord to be severed to give to
me life.

As expected and desired
(in an admittedly surreal manner),
Michael proceeds to describe in a way
that only the medical community
can, the method by which twenty four years
ago, I was hastily into this
world brought:  You know, I guess you’re supposed to
lose about a liter of blood during
the entire thing, he says, and then, for
emphasis and elaboration, points
out, you could see the resident reach in
and she was covered basically up
to her forearm in blood.

“Oh,” I comment
inanely, gropingly and cluelessly,
needing to fill the pregnant pause; “So did
the blood get on the floor?” I asked, trying
to reconstruct what it might have been like
for the phantom of that mother I call
biological, under bright lights and
the pressure of a sentiment strong that
true labor, literal extraction, blood-
-letting, pain, only to relinquish the small,
slimy, sobbing mess that was me on that
day in December, might have not been wise,
or rather, might border something
we call regret, responsibility;
but for the moment in which she heard me
crying, perhaps she was afforded one
small, vanishing moment, when everything
was not yet known, when, in that bright,
sterile room at the St. Luke Roosevelt
hospital in Manhattan, everything
was potential energy, and the world
had not yet invented disappointment.