| OCR Text |
Show known had I not found myself at the center of things: she wanted to live./She wanted to live. I realize at that moment she wanted to live. She wanted-te-eorne into this world full of pain, absence the constant, loss the narrative, but also moments where she realizes that she has been flying all these years, moments when the world cracks open in a sea of color and light and she is chosen, moments when her skin tingles, her hair shines, she eats dinner spinning through the sky, moments when she chooses and in choosing becomes the sum of the destructions. She wanted all of it, and she, not her father, and she, as much as the doctor who stooped to peer inside the bucket, maybe even more, forced herself into this spinning world, joining the lives of her parents and her siblings, willing to barter the lost against the love, and persevere. She wanted all of it. The dead baby is breathing. One more cry, distant this time, and more urgent, a cry that pulls me from this womb, this primal place, and demands that I open my eyes. It is my son. He is born. And when he is placed in my arms, still wet, bloody, trembling from the cold, smelling of the shore, the joy I feel is as limitless as the sea. 257 |
