I emerge from an icky, gooey womb. Sticky, unsolid,  red bodies crowd themselves around my millimeter fingers as I claw through a slippery membrane, God’s way of protecting me until I’m ready for reckoning. A beckoning call was never enough to make me want to escape the comfort of those concave catacomb caves, I reject this occasion the universe has conspired; I refuse to be born again; the ancestors in me are already tired. I don’t care that the world insists on my existence, I resist being born because I’ve seen this life before. I am too scorned by it, and  I could swear, in my premature form, that I could still feel the sores on my knees from falls in lifetimes past, and I lament the threat of thrusting into the earth’s crust for fear of failures future, I admit I wanted to crush those tubes that attached themselves to this billowing belly of mine, reluctant as I remember a past lifetime where I wished I could wrap them around my neck.

If I had to do this world again I only ask it be kinder, and maybe that I be wiser, that it open my eyes wider rather than that old tiring routine of rinse and repeat, stress and relapse, contact and release, let this time lapse of triumphs and traumas be a movie with compelling characters and an overarching story, rather than that unoriginal plot of an overwhelming everything that’s grown incredibly boring, or better yet let me be a polar bear and wear me like a coat or a piece of algae in the moat or a flower in the concrete or a crack on the sidewalk or anything removed from this paradoxical prison of thought, of philosophy, and rotting minds and stop signs and car crashes, let me be a pine cone or blade of grass or better yet any better being with less complicated neurons and synapses, that superficial sophistication is a nuisance, and since I’m new to this life and don’t yet know what a noose is, take care of my thin skin until I’m old enough to be cynical about it. Mother only sees me as a strange and sour fruit of her labor so

Doctor, I was hoping you could incubate the insecurities out of me before it’s too late, before I grow up too fast and feel too skinny and too fat and throw up too early, I was born feeling old. Back when that cold fluorescent lighting was the only comfort I’d ever known, before I’d grown cortexes and I instead mindlessly with small gums gnawed on my own bones, my swirling sea of visible veins curling as I crouched back into a fetal position to nibble on my toes, like a snake eating its own tail or a snail slothing around in circles, my new flesh already feels its bones brittle and its blood curdled, birth is wet and messy, with face red and figure fussy this newborn frustrates that she will ever have to face love or death or the devastation of menstruation, tidal waves of teething days, luteal phases, and the curse of creation… I was cast into a river by way of the rapids of Oshun’s oceans, Doctor, give me some potion to sedate and elate me…I’m not ready to begin drifting. But such is the impossible task of living, I want to curse my creator for giving me life, maybe they were tired of being infected by this fleshy insect, Mother pushed me out like a transplanted organ rejected, and never asked for my permission. But as an offer of digression, at least let this lifetime be my best…for I hope I’ve already seen my worst…before the famine or fender benders combustion or castration or mistakes or heartbreak or heart failure or arteries’ bursts, please, let me feel happiness first.