My conception was far from romantic. It began at 7:30 on a Friday night, under a flag that was once draped over Queen Victoria’s casket. Helen, my mother, was alone at the foot of a table with a plate of roast chicken, paired with a bowl of miso soup with enough sodium for a half-marathon. She was alone with a computer, which she spoke of fondly—it was her tool against socializing, a shield against the peril of human interaction. Unfortunately, she has no plans of allowing me to inherit the fifteen-hundred-dollar brick. She plans on selling it on eBay to buy another.
I have no possessions now; I never had any to begin with. All I am is a lump of food that has traveled through the digestive tract of a college student. The journey is seldom spoken about;, we food babies are an underrepresented population in Western society. We suffer from the acidic environment of the stomach; we travel through six feet of little intestine and another five feet of the thicker stuff. It is not a mere canoe ride, where I am free to explore the pink lining of my reality. It is a race pushed by the conception of another food baby behind me, it is a queue that moves with the graceful nudges of the spaces in which I travel. In other words, it is a hurried journey—not the sort you’d spot in a North Face advertisement.
I’ve dreamt of a more glamorous identity. The story of Alex Honnold was introduced when I was still in the stomach. Helen was supposedly in her dorm by then, watching a Youtube clip of a guy with giant hands scaling up a gigantic slab of rock. He spoke of this cosmic significance assigned to having goals and aspirations detached from conventional expectations. Living in a van with exceptional talent at clinging onto vertical planes, he had forged a life whose meaning iswas drawn from the deviance from standard abilities and aspirations.
I would later realize that such ideas wereas assigned by humans, for humans. Though I am a food baby born by a human, I am of lesser value with fewer expectations. The only expectation, as proven by the upsurge in toilet paper purchases, is that I disappear soon after birth. Never is it expected for me to achieve greatness as a human’s food baby—, we are neglected and abundant. It would have been more desirable to be a food baby of a zoo elephant. Those babies are made from organic, unprocessed food, then turned into craft paper for expensive souvenir gallery cards. Those cards are then inscribed with thoughtful memos and delivered across continents.
I, however, am designated to the lowly slums of the local sewage system. Here, I am joined by other food babies conceived in the city. One is rumoured to have been conceived in a neighbouring town, where his father enjoyed a retirement party with foie and cheesecake.
Though my beginnings as a food baby are easy to locate, when I will perish is much more difficult to predict. There is no precedent for food babies who have gone on to write an autobiography. I am unlikely the one to do so. What you have been reading is merely a fever dream. You are living the fever dream.
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