The day I thought I died

****Content Warning*****

***This poem contains depictions of body trauma and cesarian surgery***

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Splayed open on a surgical table

Like a gutted fish

Baby ripped from my womb

With force not grace

The pain

They said it wouldn't hurt

I can hear the surgeon begin to breathe heavily

He's afraid

Something is wrong

A nurse sprays a liquid into my mouth

I'm rocketed to outer-space

.....................

Goodbye

Have I died?

I wanted to see angels

but all I saw was time

Cold emotionless stretched time like an endless staircase from nowhere to nowhere

I was still sort of me

But everyone else I ever knew was false

A crushing final truth of this illusory existence

The curtain revealed and all was empty space

I wanted to go back

I didn't care if it was unreal

The illusion was warm and full and imbued with sensation

Even if it was a lie, I'd rather live in the lush beautiful lie

than in the void of nothingness at the end of the universe

From a distance I heard my partner's voice

I made my way back and his voice became an anchor

Then I felt his touch, his hand in mine

Then heard my own raspy speech

My eyes opening to the harsh white light of the operating room, at last consciousness, Retracing my own creation, and my child's

Back in the swaddled illusion and though I was still skewered on a hard slab

I was comforted and relieved

I went somewhere and came back in an instant

Afterward in the next room I couldn't stop shaking

This body trauma, this invasion,

this nonconsensual psychedelic trip

This deep emptiness that clings

Broke something open in me and

I wish I had never seen these horrors.