There is a connection between the loneliness I feel now and what I
must have felt as a baby in the incubator.  I realized that newborn
babies have no sense of time whatsoever.  Three days must have seemed
like three lifetimes and then some.  With no awareness of the events
that break up time, that separate day from night, hour from minute.
No knowledge that care continues.  Each feed the first and last, each
brief physical contact the only one in a lifetime.  And always the
desperate aloneness that stretches for eternity, the panic that there
is something that I desperately need, that I cannot put into words and
ask for.  And now I know that because I never had it then, now I can
never really have it at all.  So the loneliness that I feel now echoes
what I felt them, and seems to stretch beyond time, and will never
end.  But I don't know how it is possible that I have survived this,
what I went through when I was younger, and what I am still enduring.
I don't think that any human being should have to go through life
feeling this fundamental lack, this emptiness.
Enclosed in a bubble like a bug caught in amber, trapped and at the
mercy of those whose power far outweighed mine.  They had the power
over life and death, survival and .....  The only power I had was that
of resistance.  I could resist their insistance on my lack of value,
resist their doom laden proclamations of a worthless life, nothing
more than a vegetable (and I always wanted to know - what kind of a
vegetable?  Carrot, cauliflower, cabbage - what?), and fated to be
inferior in thought, feeling, movement.  I resisted their expectations
that I would lie placid and accepting of whatever they did to me.
Scooting endlessly up and down, up and down, testing out the confines
of this plastic bubble they condemned me to.  I pulled out the wires
and needles attached to me, these insulting non-human things that were
meant to help me live.  I knew I could live without those substitutes
for reality.  They say that the nurses could never keep a nappy on me,
I moved around so much.  So I crawled up and down endlessly through my
own shit, the only thing in the silence that was me, that was real
and human, and didn't beep and hum and pour chemicals into me.  I was
the one who was in control and I showed it. The nurses nicknamed me `the
little abortion'.  Three months too early, and very inconvieneint.