Monday, May 17, 2010

Tell me about this:

- One page of story.
or
-One paragraph of poetry.
or
-One line of dialogue.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Question:

How did you learn about the birds and the bees?

I have a very funny story about my first delve into this arena (no pun intended) and I hope the responses will be just as horrifying as my own story... which I will share in the comments later on!

Maura

Zygote

Of all the realities I could have chosen for myself, why did I pick this one?

You start in this world as a cluster of pluripotent stem cells, each immortal as the next. Embryologists actually call that clump of potential a morula – in Latin “blackberry” - because of all the little bumps. At this stage, doctors can even suck off a few cells to test without damaging the future product: Baby.

The process of maturation is not what we've been told.

We are not blank slates who grow in potential with every skill we learn or degree we receive. Our steps do not lead us toward open doors, but down an ever narrowing hallway. By the time we're 25, there's not enough room to turn around even if we knew how. We are conceived with potential, born running, and die crammed down the narrow shoot that has become our lives. My only hope is that I like the view when I get there.

Day One: Zygote

One gamete + One gamete = One Zygote.

Or more to the point: Egg + Sperm = the reason we bomb abortion clinics.

Whatever your view on the bumper-sticker abortion debate, there's no denying those little zygotes have style. They're like superheroes: cloning a thousand identical copies of them selves, each one capable of cloning a thousand more. Each doppelganger of the original, who we will call Patient Zero, is both completely expendable and infinitely important. It is humanity being made in the image of God in miniature. And each member of this supernatural clone army has the power to morph and to heal and to become any part of the human body you could imagine and a thousand others you've never heard of. To survive, though, most must fall like angels onto the hard earth of differentiation.

Only a step in some cases leaves these gods trapped and finite in an ever shrinking body. The population is growing in leaps, but once these kids marry young, they put down roots and get busy dying. They spawn little bastards made in their own image with their own strengths and faults and bad habits. This once super hero's fate is a white picket fence around the large intestine with a million babies making babies until it's sayonara and he's shipped out with tomorrow's waste. What happened?

You see, as fate would have it, the world turns not by the whim of immortals by by the sweat of a billion trillion army ants just trying to keep pace. And to survive means moving and moving means growing legs and growing legs means standing upright on the backs of would-be superheroes who gave up everything in the name of progress. Was the womb really that bad?

People say good liars need great memories, and they're right. Remembering what you said to her and to him and to them and how it differs from the rest of hers and hims and thems is tough stuff. That's why my pot head friends are the most honest people I know. As kids, knowing Jack-Shit about the world or our places in it meant we could be part of every conversation without pretense or hypocrisy. We knew what we knew until someone told us otherwise. We were as close as we would ever be again to our zygote selves – infinite in our potential and mailable as the silly putty stuck in our hair. But with every new idea that stuck, we closed off a bit more. With every Fact we learned, we were able to learn a little less. We learned that a circle was not a square and time couldn't be measured in french fries. We were losing dimensions by the day, sacrificing great though unformed ideas in favor of those that would get us by, until one day when a first grade teacher would tell us to “be creative” with a #2 pencil and one side of an 8 and ½ by 11 inch sheet of lined paper we wouldn't even see the irony. In first grade I was already dying. And no amount of home-schooling, lateral-thinking or pep-talking could turn me back. Before I'd even known that knowing better was an option, my surroundings had closed in around me. I was lost in a sea of dinner-party knees just looking for the pair of legs that would take me home. And there, in that first desire to find safety in the known, I had slit my wrists for any existence worthy of a superhero. I was basking in the infertility of Kryptonite. And I was loving it.

Followers