Choosing Mom

1. Birth “We don’t learn anything new. We just remember.”

I had buried my first memory in the storage aisles of my brain until they resurfaced when I was about 23. I don’t know if I shut it out, or I had been too distracted by all the seemingly unimportant dawdlings of my adolescence, where the things that were important to me was whether or not some lame emo boy struggling with his own sexuality and over-greased hair gave me the time of day at some stupid trendy café. Those were the things that mattered growing up, simply because I didn’t know any better.

I always thought that my mom bringing my newborn sister home when I was two years old was my first memory. I remember going up to her and looking into her eyes and she was so tiny and pink and wrinkly and she was my sister. I wasn’t jealous or anything, just curious about her and babies and the whole bit. Where did she come from? Was my mom ok? Where’d her belly go?

Now looking back I realize that my sister had just gone through what I had only two years before: the choosing of my mother, and consequently, the choice of the place of my birth.

So the first memory I have is this: I am standing with an older, fatherly man that I love very, very much. We are walking through an etheric blue space and we are talking. He is wise beyond time and space. I am wise beyond time and space. We are home and I am about to leave on a journey after just getting back from another journey. We come to a long line of women. The line stretches to infinity, they stand like statues, facing forward. They are blurry, but I know them all. Out of this line of women I am to choose the woman I am to be born unto. They are like a living catalogue of options: black or white, this country or that, this career, this house, this conditioning, these rules, this lifestyle. I found my mother and stopped. “This One, the life she can provide me with is the life where I will learn the lessons I need to learn in order for my soul to grow,” I told this man who I cherished so dearly.

We conversed. This conversation I do not remember, but now that I remember Him I miss Him sometimes and experience an ancient nostalgia. It seems as if the closer I get to death the more blank spaces of the memory color themselves in, as if the process of unforgetting gets finetuned over time.

And there I was, born unto my mother, who’s name is Dante. I like to say I come from Dante’s Inferno, because its true. I always had an affinity for the dark side, anyways. And for cosmic jokes.