On the strange situation of my birth

It’s easy to over romanticise the circumstance of my birth. Pristine white hospital walls, the cold, silvery chrome metallic sheen of complicated medical instruments. The handsome, young, clean cut doctor. A strong jaw line, a touch of stubble. The perfect, crystalline, bead of sweat that forms on his forehead, which creases slightly, enough to show a certain premature wisdom, but no sign of aging. The young nurse, flaxen haired, perfectly bronzed skin, dutifully wiping it away. Full pouting lips. A look of awe, tinged with adoration, and the possibility of pure animal lust, hidden beneath overly made up eyes.


That, as these things always are, was not the case. Enclosed by the worn dirty beige of an NHS operating room, I was torn away, clumsily pulled from my mothers womb, scarlet red, bloodied, and sickly. My father, (at this point still sporting a thick, dark head of hair, which would, eventually, be destroyed by twenty years, and three sons.) after being shooed away by various staff, peers in through the window, not out of concern so much, but out of a morbid fascination with seeing his young wife, eleven years his junior, and still in her mid twenties, cut open, and his first child, his first son, torn from the fleshy tomb which had incarcerated him, had incarcerated me, for what was fast becoming the best part of a year. No sooner as I had been moved from one small dark space was I plunged into a rather large, and exceptionally bright one. Hooked up to tubes, and machines, it was if my body was regulated by an outside force. I may as well have never been born at all.

Of course, this is my father speaking. Me, I don’t remember a thing about it. As far as consciousness is concerned, I have always been. And will probably continue to, till as long as I can remember.