Passant Eltarek
Rebirth
There are numerous ways by which you can try to return to your mother’s womb, it mostly depends on why you want to.
I had shown you an article once, about a pregnant woman whose ultrasound revealed that her baby had developed a prenatal benign tumor on the tailbone. The fetus and the tumor battled for weeks, curling through each other’s transparent figures, thieving blood from one another, sometimes through relentless sucking and sometimes through deceiving pranking. But the blood itself seemed to be on the tumor’s side, choosing it over and over, perhaps seduced by its strength over the baby’s fragile heart on the brink of failure. The doctors suggested a risky incision was the only hope, and the mother immediately abided. They tugged at the fetus until it was fully hanging outside the womb, amniotic fluid leaking from it like water from a broken ceiling. An inanimate mass of cells, the baby did not twitch as the surgeon delicately debulked the tumor, reducing it to a single powerless centimeter, and laid the fetus back inside the womb, sewing the mother’s uterus shut for the baby to continue growing and later be born when the pregnancy is complete.
“Don’t you think it’s fascinating,” I had asked you. “The way something so foreign can just decide to become a part of you, even before you have any sense of you at all, literally before you are even born. And then instead of syncing itself to you, instead of adjusting and carrying through the process of fusion, it decides to fight you, so persistently and so stubbornly, until it kills you, even though it could only be there because you are, even though it would cease to exist without you.”
“That’s just the concept of illness, tumorous or not,” you had said. “What’s interesting about this specific case is the idea of rebirth. That baby was literally born twice, once to remove the excess that would prevent it from surviving, and once for its healthy life to begin.” You had paused for a few seconds, your glittery eyes turning away from me and facing the ceiling. “Do you think that, in the future, there could be a way for the ill to be reduced back to their zygotes, inserted into a womb, or some womb-like technology, and simply reborn healthy? Wouldn’t that save so many lives?”
We had added your insight onto our list of insane thoughts document and spent the rest of the day laughing about it, silently proud of how the ideas were growing more and more insane with every entry. You left my house at dusk, agreeing to come over again the next morning; we had nothing better to do over the summer.
Instead, you woke up the next day to the news of my sudden death. I had slipped in the shower and fell, and it had only taken me four minutes to be gone; so you’d been told by my mother. Your limbs had let out and you had been hospitalized for a week. I don’t exactly know if it was our separation that had bothered you – if you had genuinely been grieving me – or if it was the way my abrupt death had challenged what you’d thought of the day before. The way it had roasted your utopia where death was a slow-burn process starting with a meet-ugly between a person and an illness, only gradually spiraling into fatality, leaving lots of time in between for realization, consultation, diagnosis, decision-making, redemption, and rebirth. But I know that, regardless of the reason, my death had struck you like a tumor. The invisible tumor, you called it, even though invisibility was an inherent quality of any tumor. It had prowled along your skin, flickered through your skeleton, swam in your breaths and cooked up your sensations. It had bubbled up beneath your epidermis, punched out holes in your intestines, picked out chromatins from your cells like dead flower petals, and settled in their spots in acts of usurpation, colonizing your interior inch by inch. It had been so gently agonizing, only whispering pain into your body, blocking any loud vicious bursts, though they would sometimes find a way to sneak in. Somewhere between an itch and a pinch, somewhere between a poke and a choke, you had decided that you needed to fight it back, that you needed to put your thought experiment into action, that you needed to be reborn to break free.
Your mother welcomed you back home with a delicate, wrinkled smile; as if you had been out on a picnic for a few hours with some friends, not paralyzed in a suffocatingly sanitized hospital bed for a week by your deadly grief over me; her face a visual lullaby with pupils taken out of a polaroid: distant, dull, and barely expressive. Or perhaps she wasn’t that cold, perhaps you only got that impression because you only really looked at her face for a second or two, your eyes too busy examining her lower belly, where your first, and perhaps your only true home resided. How little it seemed, smaller than an orange carpel. You would have to compress yourself a lot to fit in there again.
Without uttering a word, you headed to your room and collapsed on your bed, your nostrils desperate to take in the scent of home. Instead, homesickness tightened its grip on your chest, multiplying the pain. You had no strength to fight it, so you let your accumulated exhaustion octopus your body, lulling you into hypnosis, and temporarily numbing out the ache. You didn’t feel your legs when they got you up and toured you around the house in the middle of the night, you didn’t feel your feet as they skied towards your mother’s room in silent brushes with the tiled floor, you didn’t feel your arms as they stretched themselves along the empty space on the bed, nor the rest of your body that followed; yet you did feel the yearn-coated tranquility of being so close to home, so near your destination. So when you were dragged out of sleep by the sound of a secondary breath, it didn’t take you more than a couple of seconds to orient yourself; and though you knew you were still way too dense to go inside, you decided to give it a try while you were there, at least to develop a sense of how to approach it.
The fingers of your right hand coiled up in the dark, their asymmetry diagonally caressing your palm, and reached for your mother’s skin in two intervalled knocks, as if the only barrier between you and her womb was some form of a knob or a lock, as if there was a doorway that had been sealed since the day you were first born, and would rush to open up upon feeling the warm stroke of your hand. Nothing happened. You tapped once more, and then another time; still nothing. Perhaps knuckles were too harsh, perhaps skin required more delicacy. You unwound your fingers and let them drip onto her skin, one phalanx after the other, until your palm was fully spread on her abdomen, firmly pressed against it like it would be on an x-ray machine. Mesmerized by the shape of the unsealed pastel triangles formed on her skin by the gaps between your fingers, you pretended to be oblivious to how much pressure you were exerting on her stomach, hoping your hand would be gradually absorbed in, the same way a balloon cases a phone when it’s pushed against it with the adequate force. You flinched as you felt a crevice forming beneath your fingertips, almost an extension of her navel. You puffed, the echo of your gasp lingering in the air way longer than its duration, its voice louder than yours, more painful. When it didn’t go away, you glanced at your mother’s face. Her eyes were wide open, her mouth agape, the source of the prolonged scream. You had forgotten that she could wake up, that she was more than the body that had carried you for months yet was refusing to welcome you back. You snatched your hands and flew out of the room, refusing to acknowledge her, hoping she was too disoriented by the pain to understand that you were there. You didn’t get to see the crack on her skin, you didn’t get to make sure it wasn’t a delusion. You would need to shrink first, you thought. You would need to compress yourself, occupy a lot less volume than her, to create a concentration gradient, let yourself be vacuumed in by an osmosis reaction.
Eating less was the easiest part, grief having already raided your body with excessive leptin, eradicating every trace of appetite. You got thinner fast, your arms veining up and your bones shedding their tissues in osteoporosis. Your knees one-dimensioned and your thighs deflated, walking around became an onerous exercise. Even a small sneeze would electrocute your body. Yet, it wasn’t enough. You practiced balling yourself, turtling your head into your stomach, then tossing your legs backwards till your toes were tickling the nape of your neck. You folded your back till it cracked like a paperback spine, your left and right hemispheres in friction, the two sides of your lips kissing each other. You self-sheathed and cocooned, going through reverse metamorphosis. You never thought about quitting no matter the deterioration you had to put your body through. You didn’t fear destruction because you knew it would all be fixed once you’re reborn at peak health, forgetting your only source was a document we had spontaneously started three years ago to imprison our madness into. I guess I could’ve stopped you, I could’ve manifested myself into your mind, triggered your invisible tumor and tortured you with its soreness. But I was frightened by how much motivation you yanked out of your ache, terrified by your ability to torment it back. I wanted to see how far you’d go, I wanted to witness the end of your breakdown. So I just watched.
When you roamed around the house, you made sure you were either crawling or rolling, avoiding walking in case your muscles would learn how to straighten up again. When you entered your mother’s room again on another midnight a full month later, you snailed in, turboing through the floor and bouncing onto the bed. Disfigured and lilliputian, you should have cometted into her with your first clash with her tummy. You should have transcended into her anatomy, been greeted by a uterus and a pelvis. You did not. You collapsed back onto the bed like a rolling coin that just hit a wall, your body rattling in circles before it settled down, offended by how her semipermeable membranes still perceived you as a threat, even in your most frail, fragile state. Perhaps they were just not porous enough, you thought, their holes too small, too scarce to take you in.
You fluttered through all the rooms in the house looking for a hole puncher with no success, though you could’ve sworn you owned one. On your second lap, your right foot stumbled on the broken hinge by the kitchen door, sending you to the floor in wavy motions. Your fingers clasped onto the kitchen blender for steadiness, but they were too deformed to grip it well, and ended up pulling it down with you, its pieces scattering along the white tiles. Still plugged in, the motor unit started whirring, blending the oxygen and the nitrogen in the air, covering the sound of the breaking glass jug. The blender blade stood out among the splintered glass pieces cornering you, its long edges sharp and metallic. You stretched out your hand and intertwined your fingers between its edges, your fragmented reflection glaring at you, its impaired features reminding you of your mission. You carried the blade back to your mother’s bed, it should be able to cut out holes.
You laid the blade on her abdomen, nudged it with your thumb, and watched it whirl like a ceiling fan, fading away from your vision as it descended deeper into the skin, piercing through layers of flesh. It wavered up and down in an invisible pattern like memorized dance moves, knowing where to end a pathway and where to start another. You winced at the sight of blood droplets raining onto your hand, pulled your eyes shut until you couldn’t feel the blood anymore. When you looked back, all you could see was your mother peacefully lying down with an open womb, awaiting your arrival. You concaved yourself into a perfect half-moon and bunked into your spot, finally able to catch a painless breath. Submitting to the safety of the tissue mattress, you sealed your eyes shut getting ready to commence your hibernation. Insomnia unable to possess you, you drifted into your dreams, farewelling the days that wrecked you and welcoming your second chance at life, waiting for a dead body to birth a more alive version of you.
