The process of reentering my body…

Age one- 

My father left and didn’t come back. 

I’d visit him during summers where I’d see his newly forming life and family all while wondering why I didn’t fit. 

age three—

witnessing my mother beaten,

my little body being molested,

offered drugs by family made up of contracts and roles decided by signed documents of the world and not of blood. 

Many ages I’ve lived-

Manipulated and laughed at as though I were a thing

instead of an angel sent here

to be love that passes all understanding.

Born again?

The labor has come without an epidural.

It has left me folded into the floor,

returning to rooms in my mind where artificial versions of myself once learned how to survive—

Rebirthing myself has asked me to see where my life has unconsciously recreated experiences from wounds that never belonged to me,

This body…

this brain…

my heart…

my soul—

are still remembering how to recognize one another from the perspective of my soul who always knew.

It knew I was living inside the bent creations of others,

moving through stories written before I could write my own.

Born again isn’t the moment I say I believe.

It’s the moment I stop abandoning myself to appease the push and pull of others on the very force that allows me to exist in this space and time.

It’s every contraction that asks me to stay with the pain of labor to ground myself in the essence of my soul, of myself and breathe. 

Every breath that says,

I am pushing…I’m holding…I’m still here.

Every moment I choose to inhabit and hold the body that once felt impossible to live inside.

This baptism,

it is not beneath the water within buildings of steeples 

But in breaking free from being encased in a sac created out if survival that brought me to the moment before the world showed me its fangs.

It is beneath awareness…remembering. 

And every day I push,

still becoming.