Salt Lamp

I am holding my baby in the light of the salt lamp. She loves this salt lamp. I think she loves the salt lamp because it reminds her of being born. Of looking out through my vagina from inside of it. The light beyond its pink walls. I don’t tell this to anyone because it sounds vaguely conceited and insane and I don’t want to worry them. They will think: You don’t know what it looks like to be born. But I think I did once know, I just forgot. I have remembered once or twice, with the help of drugs, but of course that doesn’t count to you. And once she is old enough to confirm or deny that a salt lamp is in fact visually similar to the interior of a vagina, she will not be interested in telling me. Or maybe she will have forgotten by then too.

But for now, I am holding her here in this warm light and thinking about what else she will forget. Will these moments she and I are living together now be stored somewhere? There is a place I imagine they may be hidden, kept safe, if not also so far out of reach they cannot be found again. This place I am imagining looks as though it is underwater. But, instead of the usual blue-green of underwater places here the rippling light is pink and warm, like a salt lamp or the inside of a vagina. Its walls are soft and warm-wet. They move in and out, very gently.

But maybe these moments will not be kept. At least not safe in such a place. Perhaps these moments may be swept instead into one singular, shapeless dust pile of her infant memory that sits underneath later, firmer memories. Memories like falling off a bicycle for the first time. Surer and sharper memories forged in panic and seared into her toddler mind: when she is no longer a baby but a child, having jumped her way across some line that is incredibly opaque and vaguely menacing: unpredictable in its location like a skipping rope spun across asphalt.

It is after three in the morning. I know it is after three because the sliding door is no longer a complete black, with only the reflection of the pink salt lamp against it. The faintest lightening of the sky is beginning to show through. The outline of trees can be seen. Dawn skips toward us. I inhabit these hours now, I am familiar with these changes in sky and outline. I am familiar with the sight of the people I love deeply, deeply asleep.

Will I forget too?

Lingering behind the question itself is the knowledge of all the times I’ve deliberately urged myself to capture a moment I find myself living through with all of my capacity to do so; tried with all the force of [could it be called love?] to wrestle it from the stream of that-which-is-passing; to pin it to me somehow. Brow crossed in concentration of capture. Eyes bulging forth in cartooned exertion, extraction. But despite, or due to, such effort, all that ever remains is the memory of the effort itself. Everything is slipping further and faster from me, all the time.

For a moment I wish to be able crack open my form like my sad and smudged 2015 macbook and pull this scene and others like it from my centre (is that where memories live?) to watch on a loop. The idea being that I could replay them: over and over and over and over and over. Each rise and fall of a chest that I love. The same few breaths of air taken in, and out again. With no further gesture to break the float of time, with no need to reply to the question mumbled from a hot, sleep-filled mouth. With no change, no death.

But, how quick wish reveals its own sour breath. How immediate the answer comes: No death= No life. A brief cackle to the image of a cemetery with that succinct maxim in wrought iron above its entrance. No death, no life. Of course it goes both ways, of course it fucking does. It’s a circle. It’s a recycling symbol. It is obvious and it is literally everything.

A laughing crying feeling exists in me for this answer- this answer that is probably always the answer to many questions when you pare then back enough. Most fears are about change, even those that seem somewhat convincingly not to be. A fear of change that is wearing many layers of elaborate costuming. Look, you’ll see too. And a fear of change is a fear of both life, and death. Or death, and life. Whatever way you prefer the flip. Is change terrifying? Maybe. It is also all we are ever doing. A newborn child is only always changing. They are doing it so quickly, and yet you still can’t quite see it, can’t quite get any hold of it. Every day you are both swimming in change. There is no time lapse, only a hunger for more: more movement, more sound, more texture, more experience, more life. Clumsy chubby fingers reaching for flower heads to rip off their stems and thrust into drooling lips. Desiring this, and that, and everything. Thus they are very unavoidably alive, and somehow then, though absolutely more debased and apalling to say, they are also dying. Is is stupid to say so? Probably. I could be easily convinced that the dichotomy is one of language, one of semiotics alone. I say it would be easy because it would be. I want nothing more than to not think about the dying half of the living whole. But the body knows, even if dying is just a word and the wrong word at that, there is a non-living that we have come from and will be returned to. Perhaps the salt lamp is not how it looks to be born, but how it looks to die. Maybe they are the same place, the same thing.

My baby finds my nipple and I feel the sharp start of pain which comes with her latch. She reminds me of my body and we are both returned to it once more.

The fan circles above, pushing warm air against the sweat of my skin and cooling me. It sings dementedly with every turn: breaking but not yet broken, breaking but not yet broken, breaking but not yet broken. Time gallops softly on. A bird warbles questioningly to the slowly lightening sky. I hum a soft melody along to the fan and fall asleep.