In The Beginning
Written by Stephanie Gooch-York
It was 18 months before I started feeling somewhat of a semblance of myself again. It’s like she peeked through this tiny little rip in a thin veil of biological goop with a hard shell. Its translucency so inspiring from the inside, I look up into what I know has an exterior.
I know there’s an environment out there, but from my perspective, it’s so incredibly shrouded and blurry. It’s interesting seeing the figures bouncing around you, sometimes moving, sometimes still in their abstraction. My brain tries so hard to put together the pieces. To try and understand what the forms are saying. What they’re trying to tell me. What they are, and why they are there.
I think they’re familiar, but the anxiety produced in my body makes me realize that not knowing is the hardest part. And fuck we’ve got to be OK with that. We’ve got to be OK with not knowing. We’ve got to be OK with the spaces in between the pain and the joy.
We’ve got to be OK with the spaces in between the pain and the joy
Blurry chunks of lime, green, pink, and purple once night begins to fall. Still bouncing.
I can’t make it out but I know something’s there. I can kind of see it, and can surely feel it when it arrives. Comforting because it’s somewhat familiar, even though I don’t completely see or understand it.
That’s all I’d ever known.
Until in a moment, blinded. Blinded by light brand new. By what was right in front of me all along. But I was unable to see it.
The crevice, once things started to erupt, also something I’d never seen before. I didn’t understand how things broke apart. Nothing broke apart in my world. It was self-contained, my own bubble of a womb.
The crevice, completely new to my experience. It was sharp and jagged. The edges dark in contrast and broken up like shards of what I assumed in some way, was also inside and part of my body.
They were pointy and kinda hurt when you touched em too hard. A severe shift, such a profound break of something I had only known to be self-contained. A safe, goopy never changing circle of an environment swirling in and of itself only.
The light from the crevice was blinding, undeniably shattering the cells in my body. It felt like theory even though I knew it was happening. I couldn’t see it; I could feel it. It felt as if the light burst open every tiny micron of my being, giving its first breath, nutrients, and moisture to expand and evolve.
I realized that the fear and terror of what was lying beyond the break was what I needed to understand. To integrate to continue.
It took me I don’t even know how long to get to the point of being able to tickle the tips of my fingers on the edge of that light. Once I did, I realized the feeling it produced in my body when I touched it was electrifying, filling my senses in a way I didn’t understand anything could.
I swiftly reached up with my other hand eagerly searching for edge when I found it.
The edge was the literal in-between.
The edge is the precipice.
The edge is moving from one thing into the next. It’s essential to cross over to the other side. I embraced the realization and with everything in my being burst through my imposed shell integrating it all. Letting things evolve…as they may.
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