At first I was nowhere, and yet I was there.

I felt nothing, sensed nothing. Only, from time to time, a pneumatic sensation of movement. “I understand now—I am the ocean,” I told myself. “And these are my blind motions: tides, flows, currents…”

Then once again, nothing. Only darkness and silence. “I’ll try to open my eyes,” I thought. But I could not tell whether I had eyes at all, or whether there was only dense water within dense water, the pulp of water, the blueprint of a membrane. “Then perhaps I am still within the amniotic element, still virtual, prenatal sediment,” I thought for an instant.

I felt waves and vast spaces passing through me, planets, masses of full light. Everything ablaze and kneaded together, cold. Then swallowed once more. I was falling. Perhaps I was screaming.

Impossible to emerge. The exit far away, ever farther away. To return to the blind, burning tomb, to swim within it, ciliated and unrealized. Impossible to go forward, impossible to return. To scream, and then scream again, within the soft element that remembers nothing, feels nothing. Every movement impossible. Only to scream, and then scream again, without anyone able to hear, able to decipher. If only one could extinguish oneself, could return…

To scream, to scream—one can only scream.

“I am reliving the horror of birth. I am being born!” I suddenly understood.