Be Born

I swear that the events I will recite from now on will be the truth. I would swear in the name of something, like God or my mother, but I have nobody or nothing whom to rely on. It’s certainly freeing, to a certain point, not being anchored to anything, but it’s lonely.

It’s highly curious how an event can come about thousands of times the exact same way and have a completely different result each time, or even more, behave exactly the same except for a single instance. A baby can be exposed to the same stimuli several times and it would cry at random, and an old man could complain about hundreds of politicians before fervently following one identical to the others. The point is, my previous host hit his head against the frame of a door, like he has done countless times, but this time he went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Sometimes I deliberate on whether he could have seen it coming, if he could have avoided it. Perhaps he did it on purpose, I don’t know with which but it’s a theory over which I’ve meditated a lot (I don’t have much to do beyond meditating).

Whatever the point, he went to sleep and I woke up. The world was blurry and liminal. Scratch that, the world IS blurry and liminal even today. It was white and sterile, derived from a heaven, with red lines like veins exploring endless hallways. The first thing I heard was the scream from the babies while I was carried in a stretcher, and I decided that being born must be painful. So I screamed.

I was placed in a stretched room with several people who laid in their plastic sarcophagi. I wondered if they slept like my previous host, and if they now had people like me. I would come to realize that they had been rendered completely empty, and I was one of the few exceptions, which was a disappointing result.

There was a bible on my bedside table. There were also several spiritual books similar although made of a paper of lesser quality than taught me about the clinical nature of the soul. Making cross-reference between all the texts, I deciphered that the soul is a piece of paper that contains the information that reveals a man, something like the genetic code.

In absence of a place to belong to, I pretended to be the previous host and assimilated to his life. He was twenty years old and lived with his parents, went to the college of Bellas Artes, and had his room covered in posters of near-naked women. This last thing bothered me, I had little interest in the opposite sex and was bothered just being there. So I started to rip them out and throw them into the trash one by one, timing it to put distance between each one so the parents of my previous host wouldn’t realize. Nonetheless, the woman that called herself my mother looked at me wrong.

College was a bad time. I didn’t get the point of art and was incapable of reproducing the beauty in the sculptures I had found from my previous host. Art comes from absolutely nothing by talented people that are capable of generating it from pure air, an ability with which I wasn’t born. I saw the collection he had created through his life placed in a shelf in my room, and it disgusted me to see they were mostly near-naked women with big eyes and small mouths. Seriously, this man had something with near-naked women. I “accidentally” tripped and fell over the statues, breaking them in a thousand pieces. This will teach him. I don’t know which lesson I was looking to teach him, but it was satisfying momentarily.

I could not understand the objective of art. So I despised college. I despised a lot of things, not being anchored by anything I was incapable of anchoring to anything. I recognize it was rushed on my part and perhaps a tad childish, but I don’t regret having dropped out. It was just a problem I had inherited from the previous host and if he wanted to remain there then he shouldn’t have switched places with me.

His friends visited me. They were diverse and varied, of all colors and sizes. But they were all men. Of course. Although I was happy there weren't any women, they brought me a certain indisposition I can’t explain, especially the woman who called herself my mother. They have cooties.

I tried the best I could to relate to them, but I couldn’t. I did not know the interests they spoke about and I didn’t know what an “anime” was. I still don’t know what it is. Little by little they stopped appearing and speaking to me, to the point I was left truly alone. I should have been happy I’d have to stop trying to fit in with these ghosts of my previous host, but I felt more orphaned than ever. It seems like I truly didn’t belong anywhere.

I was terrified. By this point I had been informed that I was supposed to be the person I was before, but I didn’t identify at all with him. I had the theory that I was just my previous self with severe amnesia, but I discarded it. If I was the previous host I’d have at least something to hold on, but I had nothing. I wondered over the volatile essence of the soul, if perhaps I had written over the book of my previous host with my mere existence. The soul is something inconsistent and changing, in spite of being so important.

When it was night, and I laid in my bed and played sleeping closing my eyes, I dreamed that the previous host was only sleeping inside of me. That is, he was just pretending to sleep like I did, and one day he would wake up and rescue me from being myself. This rescue was what I was counting on.

I realized that the woman who called herself my mother was starting to catch on to what was happening. She had realized that I wasn’t her son. I can’t understand the grief she must have gone through and processed, but by the time she confronted me she seemed to have no doubts.

“You are not my son.” She had told me one day, standing in my way on the house’s hallway.

“Excuse me?”

“I said you are not my son.” She closed the distance between us. This made me disgusted. I didn’t want her close to me. “You don’t act like him, you stopped talking to your friends, you dropped out of college. I don’t know who you think you are, but…”

“But?” I asked her. She covered her face and wiped her tears. I realized in that moment that I had never cried. I filled myself with courage and took a few steps forward, in spite of my repulsion. “What are you suggesting, mom?”

“It’s nothing.” And she left.

She left me alone again, naturally, reflexing. In how she must love her son enough to confront me over taking him away, taking him hostage inside his own body, but I thought that not enough to insist on the topic. She must be afraid of me, because I had the power of taking a son from her, the most terrible thing that could happen.

No. I was seeing this from the wrong point of view. It’s not that she didn’t love him enough, it’s that she loved him so much that it was impossible for her to get mad at me, for I wore his face over mine. The love she felt for him was immortal and overcame time and space to stop in this house. I wondered, why did she have a son, if it’s a temporary relationship that would only end one day? Why did someone decide she had to exist? Why do I exist?

One cannot consent to their own existence. It’s a decision that has to be taken by others. I didn’t have any way of inquiring into the motivation the woman that called herself my mother had, but I had a good idea that what motivated my previous host was making the biggest amount of connections possible. These must be the reason why one exists, and why I must exist, but I can’t understand why a mother would decide to have somebody.

I decided to speak with the man who calls himself my father. He was getting more and more nervous around me, like he had something to hide. In that we were similar.

“Dad.” I sat to his side on the kitchen table. He looked at himself reflected in the bottom of the yerba mate.

“Of course.” His voice had a certain reluctance to it.

“You love me, right?”

“Of course, what made you think otherwise?” He arched an eyebrow while he gripped the mate with both hands. He took a small hit from it and continued. “It’s about what your mother said, that you’ve changed since you hit your head?”

“You’d do anything for me, right?” I asked. Behind me, I hid the knife with both hands.

“Well, it’s undeniable that you’ve been acting a bit weird ever since, but I think you’re still deep down the same person.” He said, speaking more to himself than with me. “The hit only left you a bit stunned and you don’t feel like yourself. It’ll pass.” He smiled. “Yes, I’d do anything for you.”

“Then, would you die for me?” And I stabbed him on the side.

It could sound violent and impulsive, and it certainly was, but in the moment it made perfect sense to my melancholic-passion-addled brain. If he truly claimed to be my father, even though this link might be false and based on a lie I cooked up, he must be ready to put his life on the line. That is what makes a real father, the starting point where youth ends and fatherhood begins. I suppose it wasn’t very compassive on my end, in hindsight.

The events that happened after were as blurry as my birth. I don’t remember if I killed him or not. I ended up in a white and sad building, with people being spit by every door and running to others to begin the process all over again. I was prohibited from getting out, and I was stuck there. There were no books, knives, or statues. Only people, people who were more awake than me. Before entering I didn’t know it worked by levels, but these people clearly speak with entities I couldn’t comprehend.

I wonder if I’ll die here like I was born before. If death is as painful as it is to be born, confusedly going from one side to the other, or if it’s painfully clear with every detail obvious to the one who suffers it.

But I can hug myself. I’m not alone. I have my previous host somewhere, even though he doesn’t exist anymore. If I have a bond, then I surely can have more. My reason to be exists, yet.

Some tears escape me. He is my mother.