The Drowned

We come into the world weightless. Swimmers slipping into the water, our eyes tightly shut. In the world, but not yet of it.

For a split second there we are still bouyant, still capable of flight. For a moment we could still rise and get away.

These are the things we are never told.

This is what the placenta is for - to keep us anchored to the earth. This is why the nurse or doctor or midwife will hold us carefully tight until we have taken our first breath, have opened our lungs to the world and been drowned in its gravity.

This seems cruel, I know, but it is for our good. Left to ourselves we would run out of air before we had drifted away completely, we would discover too late our absence of wings. The fall would be severe.

Yet this is why we bawl, why we cry. This is why, as children, we love balloons, remembering what we could have been.

It is not the womb we are trying get back to. It is the sky.