Post-Op

Being alive is such a drag - that’s what our newborn baby would say if only she could talk or even have a burst of cognition so complex (at this point, it’s all about digestion). And what a sham we had to perpetrate even to conceive her; this illusion of human dignity and beauty, of physical attraction. Any woman who has had a caesarean birth – or anyone at all who has been cut open under their own watchful eye, understands the reality that we are all just pieces of meat – bloody and full of spilling guts, and not at all beautiful at that except for above the thinnest, superficial layers of skin.

And yet we go on believing in our own sexuality and the allure of others’ thin sheets of skin, eyeballs, eyebrows, lips and the like, which barely conceal all the bloody gore that lies within us; flushing these realizations out of our minds for the very purpose of deceiving ourselves as to the true nature of humanity. Why? When this illusion is enough to grab us by the (proverbial) balls and erode any sense of decency we had, shattering our egos (the ego is also an illusion, but this does not make it sting any less) and leaving us in ruins. This very same illusion also causes us to, after spending our most precious, personal, intimate moments with another human being, suddenly become a stranger to that person and isolate ourselves completely from them, thus suffering the even more painful illusion that all these critical moments of attachment – of joining of souls – never even happened (indeed they didn’t, but this again does nothing to ease the pain).

After all, what are we but two especially tough pieces of meat, projecting our ideas of what a human should be onto each other. There is no way out of this double conundrum – except, except, except. Our children give us a reason to be together: we must team up to raise them, even when we feel that we have absolutely nothing in common and would rather not embrace each other’s rank, bacteria-filled, meaty bodies, we have reason at the end of the day to bunker down and hold onto each other as the universe (with all its flotsam and jetsam) flies by. And finally – most importantly – life is so filled with pain, if you really think about it, that our children’s smiles are the only things that pull us together and keep us sane amidst all the insanity.

This wasn’t supposed to be about you, my love, but it turned out to be. Perhaps because I too got caught up in the grand illusion and didn’t give you your due. You on the other hand have seen my utterly bleak humanity, the ugliness of my desires and my absurd projections, and decided to love me anyway. And sometimes, at the end of a long day, you still crouch in next to me in bed and just hold me – blood, guts and all, though I’ll never be able to figure out why.