New Life

The pain was slamming into me in intense waves. A steamroller flattening my belly, every five minutes, for long minutes at a time, with no respite.

I had been waiting so long for this. Seventeen extra days. Seventeen interminable extra days. Resisting authority's viewpoint that it would be better to initiate the process artificially. To remove myself from my comfortable home and enter the world of the sickly and dying, sanitised beyond belief yet riddled with disease, no place for new life to start.

I welcomed it. I embraced the pain I had so longed for. With each new twisting wrench I knew my goal was closer. With each nauseating swell I came nearer to meeting the small life I had carried so carefully for nearly ten months.

I sank into the water and allowed it to take my weight. Let gravity stop here, barricaded outside the pool, working on everyone else, I at last exempt. The relief was immediate, powerful, so welcome. I closed my eyes and focussed inwards; through the muscle and sinew; the beating and whooshing of blood pumping strongly, effortlessly, inexorably. From time to time, with each new surge, I let escape a long, low moan, my breath and voice working in conjunction with my body to expel this separate entity from within.

The urgency arrived swiftly, suddenly, relentlessly. The quickening. The quality of the pain transformed subtly. The bearing down of muscle and bone, the heightening of awareness, the crescendo of noise. And then... And then the journey! The shifting, sliding, irresistible transit from one pool of liquid to another. The helplessness, innocence, newness...

And the love! Oh God! The love...