I Was Born Choking
A true story!
I was born choking.
I’ve heard the story a hundred times. How for just a second, I was the newest thing in the world, and then I wasn’t. I can imagine how they moved when I didn’t cry, quick and purposeful, turning my purple body upside down. My father says it was the longest two minutes of his life; my mother says it was the hardest prayer she’s prayed. An act of religion like any other.
To be saved, to be sacred.
Long after I forgot the language of prayer, I found myself uttering its phrases, its memory a
plug in my throat.
Do you hear me?
Am I part of you?
We would laugh about it, the mucus plug, the hairball, such ridiculousness near-death.
And later, I would learn you cannot cut out your mother tongue no matter how sharp a knife you use. You cannot keep the soft curve of your shoulder from returning to this first posture, a pilgrim, a mammal.
To be saved, to be sacred.
There is a floor of cold tile, a flash of blue and yellow. There is a girl whose hair I want to hold. There is a prayer on my lips, my mother tongue,
my tongue, my mother.
And then there is another country I journey to, of rage and loneliness. There is badness
spreading. There is a bird that shutters in my palms (is it still a bird if it no longer sings?) and there is an unmarked plot in the backyard with a cardboard box and I tell myself I will never sing again, not if this is what it means, not if there is always something to choke on.
It’s a funny thing. When the same thing is shoved down your throat over and over, you grow to like it. You even grow to want it. Familiarity, maybe. Or maybe it is the body’s way of pretending it isn’t so bad, the heart’s way of turning itself inside out.