Bao Huiyi
poet
PhD in Medieval Literature, University College Dublin
Associate Professor, Department of English, Fudan University
Maybe it's time to tell you everything.
Everything that day was so concrete and physical that it would be absurd to tell it in the same concrete square words. When the void is split, the tangible is pulled out of the void, and the life that has been polished by imagination for a long time becomes a palpable, flesh-and-blood existence, this metaphysical violence is tantamount to an advent, from a distant universe beyond my reach.
Violent, yes, I can't lie. You are a little god who has been suddenly thrown from outer space into the sublunar world, perhaps from Jupiter's yet-to-be-named moon. When you fall into the earth, you will be contaminated with dust, and you have been laid on the soil of the world through my flesh, and you have walked with me on the surface of the earth, which is what they call n-born. Your growth was a nine-month-long invasion of my body plus a violent invasion for the rest of my life, and no amount of love can cancel the fact that no amount of love can cancel. Did you know that the uterus can grow up to 1,000 times its size in the third trimester of pregnancy? That's about the Sun-to-Jupiter, or Jupiter-to-Earth. A solar belly can hold 1,000 Jupiters, and that's my womb, which bulges itself into a tiny sun to build up nebulae around you.
With the amniotic membranes wrapping around you, the amniotic fluid shaking you, the umbilical cord transfusing blood for you, and the placenta breathing for you, you look 100% self-sufficient. The womb is expanding on its own, so that the other parts of my body also need room to survive. So my lungs were pressed to the sides, and I flew centrifugally, my stomach was pushed up to my chest, and more organs were pushed straight into my ribs, and I was a disaster of anatomical reorganization. For the first two months of your birth, I was in a constant state of drowning, and on those nights when I couldn't roll over or sit up to drink, I prayed that the breath of the moment that was passing away would continue with the breath of the next moment when I didn't know when. It turns out that breathing with lungs is not a matter of course, it turns out that human beings did originate from the sea. I pray that in the depths of my insight, your breath doesn't have to be so painful. I know that you don't need to breathe with your lungs for nine months, but then—the first second you come into contact with the dust of this world, you will be forced to learn to control your untrained lungs in an instant, and the air will pour into your vacuum-like mouth and nose, and how terrifying is the astonishing advent from abstraction to embodiment! I have taken maternity lessons, but no one has ever trained you to sleep in the dark for a long time, how do you get rid of the suffocation of the first moment, and even cry with oxygen evenly?
Yes, I can't deny that, despite the violence, the source of my sorrow is, of course, you. We haven't known each other yet, but your heart has been beating in me for nine months, it's just the blood that goes from my heart to yours, it's just that we exchange heartbeats, we exchange cells, we exchange materials, "nothing more," as Aristotle would say, I hate Aristotle, I hate him and his systematic shallowness. In the sixth week I heard your heartbeat for the first time, coming from the ethereal sea, amplified, twice as fast as me, filling the entire dimly lit room. I felt a bullet pierce my heart. You are an absolute accident and a relative necessity, and I will definitely learn to accept you. If the man of Nazareth must have redeemed the world, the moment he made up his mind, he must have heard the heartbeat of all mankind in himself.
At the twentieth week, lying next to your father, I felt definite fetal movements for the first time. A note glides across the belly, followed by two, three, a set of major third chords, and a series of light drifts. Your exterior is close to mine, and you'll be challenging that divide in the months to come, turning liminal space into a fighting arena for punches and kicks. Your father likes to put his childhood toy warrior on my navel to see if you can shoot it down in a minute, and when you're quiet, his face is full of disappointment, is it male or human destiny to be aggressive? I'm not a cautious woman, when you're almost three months old, I've been riding my bicycle on the island for six hours straight, for five months I've been running with my belly on my stomach chasing a ship that is about to leave the shore, for six months the whole city is sick, I've been crying all night long, and you're so calm as an anchor that you seem to laugh at me for being too easily worried, and at eight months, I've mustered up the courage to go into the cinema, and within a few minutes of the opening, a space elevator roars up and enters the air, which is said to be 90,000 miles, and in the midst of a ringing in my ears, the inside of my womb suddenly shakes, and this is the first time you have clearly sent me a message of danger, and I have only moved from the fifth to the twelfth row。 The world on the screen is empty and exciting, just like off-screen, sorry I can't leave at this moment. Sorry, I'm not the kind of mother who can stay in bed for months to make sure you're safe, and I never even thought about being a mother before you first appeared in sonic waves. You are the potential zero and infinity, I am a life that has been in existence for thirty-seven years, I look forward to witnessing your laughter and tears, but I can't stifle my laughter and tears in exchange, I don't want to, I don't want to, I can't be moss that takes root in the same place shrouded in the light of motherhood. I'm not moss.
You arrived early on that day of 38 weeks and 5 days, and now, I will tell you what happened on that day.
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