Chapter Two: A Flawed Entry ---Fragments of a Dissociative Universe---

I didn’t arrive in this world with a cry. I arrived with a flaw, and by C section.

The first thing my body knew wasn’t the warmth of a mother’s chest or the rhythm of her heartbeat. It was the cold, sharp slice of the surgeon’s blade, the tug and pull of being lifted from a darkness that had turned against me. Then, the antiseptic sting of a hospital air. The smell of disinfectant, blood, and cold metal clung to everything, heavy and merciless. July 1978, the day I was born, was also my mother’s birthday. A cruel irony, as if fate wanted to etch a scar into the calendar before I even opened my eyes.

I was too big for the narrow tunnel of the womb, and inside that cramped darkness, my foot had twisted itself crooked. My very position was a problem. So when they cut me out, their solution to my body’s first failure was as immediate as it was brutal. They broke my tiny bone so they could set it straight. Imagine that. Your first experience of the world is not a gentle welcome, but the clinical crack of your own bone being snapped back into shape. My leg was then swallowed up in plaster, heavy and suffocating, an infant limb entombed before it had even learned to move.

My body, from the very beginning, was not my own. I was a project to be repaired. A problem to be solved. And as if the crooked foot wasn’t enough, my skin carried its own torment. It was raw, restless, breaking out in ways no one could explain. Dermatologists tried their sterile potions and creams, but every attempt failed. My skin remained a battlefield, a riddle carved into me before I even knew how to speak.

Meanwhile, my mother was collapsing from the surgery that had brought us both into this harsh light. A serious infection tore through her system, feeding off a severe anemia that left her as pale as the hospital sheets. She almost died. That bond, the primal connection every newborn should have, was severed by the scalpel and the sepsis before it could even take root.

She couldn’t breastfeed me. Her body, ravaged and weak, refused me. And mine, in turn, refused the powdered formulas they pressed on her. Enfamil poisoned me. My cries must have been piercing, violent, the screams of a body at war with everything meant to sustain it.

My first nourishment didn’t come from a mother or a sterile, engineered bottle. It came from oat milk — a strange, unconventional substitute for a strange, unconventional child. It was served from a hacked tool, a testament to a life that would be defined by improvisation: a plastic cup with holes plugged from the inside by toothpicks. I can still almost feel the hard plastic against my lips instead of a soft nipple, the first of many dissonant sensations.

Desperation set in. After every medical path had failed, someone told my mother to try something almost ridiculous in its simplicity. An oat bath. Not to feed me oats, but to submerge me in them. A peasant’s remedy, whispered as a last resort when all of science had failed. She clung to it because there was nothing else left.

That night, she bathed me in the cloudy, grain soaked water. I imagine the smell, warm, earthy, almost sweet — filling the room, a stark contrast to the metallic bite of the hospital. My infant skin, red and angry, was soaked in it while she prayed it would do something, anything.

By morning, everything had changed. My skin had peeled. The angry, broken surface was gone, sloughed off like a husk. What lay beneath looked untouched, new. She said I looked like a brand new baby, as if I had been reborn overnight.

That was my first miracle, if you want to call it that. Not divine. Just desperate improvisation. My life began in a planned incision, in flaws, fractures, infections, and failures. And yet somehow, through an accident of oats and timing, I was renewed.

From the very start, my story wasn’t about belonging. It was about survival through unlikely means. About being cut out, broken, patched, and reborn in ways no one could have ever prescribed.

Chapter 3: The Ghost in the Machine