I was born sandwiched between a coup d'état and the beginning of a war.
I was born in the year of oh well, whatever, nevermind. Of load up on guns and bring your friends. Of losing my religion and here we are now, entertain us.
I was born in a blizzard, and every year that followed were also blizzards, to commemorate and remind me of my origin and thus my true nature. My being born was the time of cold and chaos, god whipping the earth’s ass, the time of many things freezing and what doesn’t kill you. I was constructed out of this chill, imprinted with the beauty and mourning that accompanies devastation.
So God gave me the understanding of uncalculated and unpredictable, nature’s impersonal nurturing. God finger-flicked me out in the time of treaties and operations called after this landscape, with harsh names like desert storm and acid rain. As a birthright present I was then equipped with this same brutality and ability to survive, with the familiarity of coarseness and the inerrant conditions of a life. When I entered the world, a war was already being waged named after the cold.
I'm a miracle because of all of this.
I was the middle of a recession and the invention of Fruit-by-the-Foot. I was born as a soft truffle chocolate: an outer dusting of bitterness that is shocking yet intriguing, followed by the relief of melting creamy sweetness. A king died in Norway when I was born. A gale hit America and they called it the perfect storm.
I was born and the first website was introduced to the world. I was the last one in the universe to know life before computers. I was the very last person to see the switch happen between no-internet and then, suddenly, world wide web. I was born in exactly that blinking cursor gap.
Movies that were birthed the same year I was: Silence of the Lambs, The Addams Family, Cape Fear. I’m hoping this can help to illustrate the darkness and unsettled humor that was swirling in the air and fused its way into my bloodstream the day my spirit dropped into a body. The transferred resilience of strange and unholy I caught like a contagion.
I was born on the eighth day of a month, and eight days after I cried my first hot-blooded hello a woman named Aileen confessed to murdering six men and was labelled a serial killer. Many years later a famous model-turned-actress would play her in a movie and win a fancy award for pretending herself ugly. I was born into this too: a seesaw place that forced some women into darkness and awarded others for performing it. Smack-dab into the crossroads of that dissonance came tiny me, torn between the real things that repulse and the lighthearted glamorous approval of the unreal things.
I was born as a mountain town people spend lots of money to visit and ski down my slopes. I was a hot spring relief and a bubble of sulphur from the Earth’s bowels. I was hardy and red-cheeked and cruciferous. I knew how to take the ice and make it a plaything.
Because of all the cold, God was nice enough to make me into a nifty handbook of logs and tree branches, of making what you have into a roaring fire, of learning to forage and scrap to salvage what you can to keep warm in inhospitable conditions. I was born Lucy, creeping through the back of a wardrobe in an old country manor during wartime, able to see the magic because she believed it was there.
I was born everybody else’s girl but one day, yes, I became my own.
(A chapter in Jenny Slate’s book Little Weirds helped inspire this, and shout-out to my aunt Carol for sending it to me to read. I was born into families of sisters on both sides, fumbling covens of women, another prize in the dowry of my birth.)