Tabula Rasa

A shrewd crie scraped through the still air as intensely as the slit of sun shining through the cracks in the curtain. There was a short silence followed by a long, gruesome moan. More screams echoed through the white industrial hallways, absorbing into the stiff pillow that I had stuffed my head under. Her shrieks were mangled and disturbing. Hideous sounds tore through her vocal chords. They forced my dreary mind to climb into a conscious state. I lay awake with the sheets tangled around my torso, one ankle hanging loosely out of the covers, exposed to the open air. I could feel her cries jabbing my eardrums and stinging the inner layer of my skull.

By the time breakfast had arrived on a red plastic tray the newborn was wailing between every breath. I stared at my pile of scrambled eggs as they steamed in the sunlight and thought about how depressing it was that the first thing a child does when they are born is cry. It’s as though consciousness itself is to blame for all of the world’s suffering. A baby wants nothing more than to return to its mother’s warm womb, comforted and protected by the interior of another human being. Why must we be forced to endure the human experience without any consent? Life is brutal under all of its beauty.

I pulled on a pair of wool socks and shuffled across the floor to the sink. My eyes sunk into the mirror before me. There was no person there, only ideas. A bunch of ideas all scrunched up into a brain and attached to a body. I splashed the water onto my face and grabbed the sink as droplets of water fell from the tip of my nose down the drain. My head was ringing with the baby’s wails that echoed throughout the maternity ward.

“How do you feel today?”

I let my arm fall limp as the stranger drew blood into a little plastic tube. It pooled in slowly, so I squeezed my hand into a fist, thinking I could grasp at what little control was available to me. I could feel the nurse’s eyes switching back and forth from my arm to my face as she awaited a response. A wave of anxiety washed over me as I thought about the many ways in which her pending question could be acknowledged. I knew that she was expecting a casual, one word response, but I thought that any answer I gave her would be obsolete compared to the ocean of veiled emotions swimming around in the pit of my stomach. Her question lingered through the air as my little vein pumped out blood at an embarrassingly slow rate.

“Fine.”

That just about summed it up.

My feet slid over the vinyl floor as I made my way to the shower room. The baby’s cries sounded gruesome and obscure. They echoed off of the walls and split through the back of my skull. I approached a room where the screams escalated to a near inaudible pitch. The door had a slight angle in its hinges, hanging ajar, allowing for a small scene to be observed from where I had stopped in the hallway. I could make out the mother’s arms folded around a blanket, rocking back and forth at a steady rhythm, humming a miscellaneous tune under the baby’s hideous wales. Her face was concealed, but her hands looked tender, almost fragile, under the weight of the newborn. I could sense the fear in the tightness of her fingers; the dread of raising such a pure soul in this deranged world.

The shower melted my skin. I could feel every particle of my body sting under the heat. It scorched my chest and trickled down to my feet like a dull knife dragging through my skin. I allowed my mind to dissociate, leaving my body, escaping the physical world. My solution was always negligence; instead of readjusting the temperature, I refused to believe that I could feel anything at all.

I passed by the same room on the way back. The air was still and silent. Hair dripping, I peered into the crack between the wall and the door. No one was there. My hand pressed the door and I followed it into the room. There was a shiny white crib next to the industrial hospital bed. I clutched my towel to my chest and shuffled over.

Inside the crib, there lay a small lump of fabric. The eyes inside of the bundled cloth gazed up at me. They slit through every layer of identity and delusion of self that I had attached myself to until I was merely a string of particles tied together in a human experience. I felt my sense of self dissolve until I was merely a body of chemicals standing over a crib.

The baby scrunched its entire face in an attempt to squint underneath the harsh fluorescent lights. I thought about how intense each sensation must have been for a being such as that with no mental depth to hide beneath. The only reality that existed for that baby was the scrutiny of the present moment. It was a blank slate, a tabula rasa, absorbing everything in its sensory field and creating its very first neural connections.

Hey! I’m Denzy. Like my writing? Follow for more! Want something like this for yourself? I do freelance writing! Lets get in touch :) denzybjames@gmail.com