We returned to the diverging paths between the happy, warm world that I had created as Nydia’s child. {left} I am loved, adored, wanted and safe. I cry and someone, everyone comes to see what I need. I’m allowed to explore my new world and all sorts of new contact, humans and animals. When it’s time to eat, Nydia and my sisters take turns feeding me. I’m everyone’s child. Nydia sings to me and cuddles me and touches me all over just to reassure me that I belong to her and by extension everyone else in the house. She puts me down to sleep between her and Luís and hums quietly until I’m asleep. If I murmur, one wakes to see what I need. Sometimes, they put me in my own bed too, but it’s not like it was. I can see them and it’s quiet. I sleep peacefully, until I need something. I cry and one of them gets up and feeds or changes or rocks me back to sleep. My life here is safe and comfortable. I have no worries, but something is tugging on my right side. Something doesn’t feel quite right and the picture elongates much like the Starship Enterprise does before it goes into warp speed. Something is pulling me the the right. Something I don’t know and something I’m afraid of.
I don’t like it here. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this again. I remember the curtain. I remember the little box with the rubber hands. I remember the little crib that filled and emptied and filled and emptied while I stayed. Nydia was the only constant. I don’t know this place. I only know the {left). This void scares me. My little arms and hands and legs and feet are flailing all to get back to what I know and what I’m comfortable with, familiar with {left), but it keeps moving away and I’m being dragged farther and farther into this dark place that I don’t recognize. As the light fades, I stop fighting. My hands, arms, legs and feet stop moving and go cold. My body shuts down. This keeps happening. This is the third or fourth time now that I’ve been ripped away from the only things I’ve known, good {left} or bad. My tiny proto-self isn’t able to withstand too much more.
I lazily gaze toward the direction I’m headed. {right} I see a faint light. I’m headed toward that faint light and I can’t stop myself. I look back left and see only a pin-prick of my little yellow home {left} and a tear forms in the corner of my eye and drifts effortlessly into the void. I don’t like the void. I don’t know it. It’s dark and unfamiliar. It’s cold and impersonal, but it has a certain warmth and appeal to it. In the void there are no expectations. There are no disappointments. I’m a baby. I’m less than 6 months old and have been disappointed many times already. I force myself to stop somewhere in the middle of the void and look around. There’s nothing. I feel nothing. There’s no hot, no cold, nothing. No happy, no sad, nothing. No anger. Just nothingness. I decide that I want to stay in the nothingness. I want it to envelope me. I want it to protect me. In the nothingness, I’ll be invisible and I’ll never be pulled away from anything again.
The unfamiliar light starts tugging at me again and you can’t hold on to nothingness {void}. I look back home {left} and can just barely make out the little yellow start from where I came. I’m moving faster and the big, brash white light is quickly getting nearer. {right} I’m tired. I don’t want to play this game anymore. I close my eyes and shut down again. {right}
I sense that I’ve stopped moving. I’m being held, but it’s not the same way. It’s not the same touch. I feel fingertips on my skin. I don’t know them. They don’t belong to {left}. They’re cooler, somehow. I feel a finger in my little hand and it’s the same sensation. The touch is not the same. Maybe my body is just protecting itself from being rejected again. I look up and see different faces, less round, more oval shaped. One has brown eyes, like {left} but not as big and not as bright. The other has clear, cold eyes that I’ve never seen before. I go back to sleep while they talk to someone else.
I wake up momentarily and realize that I’m not being held. I cry and the one with brown eyes turns around and tries to quiet me. The cold eyed one grumbles a little because I should be asleep. I’m used to being held and not being in a box. I also know that I’m moving, but I don’t understand how. There’s a stop and then moving again. I’m completely confused and start to scream because I don’t know what else to do. The cold-eyed one stops the cage and the brown-eyed one gets in the back with me to soothe me. The cage starts moving again. The brown-eyed on touches me and sings, kind of like {left}, but different. It was still soothing. I try looking left and the little yellow dot that was my home had vanished. {Left} was gone and I knew instinctively that something wasn’t quite right about {right}.
Now, 46 years later, I stand at the top of a pyramid. I see and partially experienced {left} and I went through all of {right}. I see where some of the links are. I see what could’ve been had I been able to grow up {left}. I see all of the little tragedies flayed out nicely by my experience growing up {right}. I don’t see the void at the bottom of the the pyramid that hold the whole thing together because I don’t exist in that space.
cazandoconejos 