Umbilical.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE SHIT THIS

but i think i bungled whatever the hell was was point at the end LOL

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I notice my shirt is too tight when I can clearly make out my bellybutton. I stare at it in the blurry reflection in the car window. This melon-baller scoop is proof I am human. That I was born. This is proof I was once a mass of translucent cells incubating in my mother’s womb.

One day maybe I will have my own mass growing inside me.

I run my finger around the rim of my bellybutton, through the thin cotton. How would that feel? A taught, bloated stomach, like a balloon grown under the skin. And then inside– some alien thing, writhing, growing, turning. Feeding.

I stick my finger into the twisted hollow where I was once connected to my mother.

I imagine going in further, pushing my entire hand under my skin. I imagine the squish of yellow fat and the palpations of skin as I drum my fingers against my stomach. Intestines under my hands like fresh pasta. Warm. Safe. I could reach up into my chest, bent over with my forearm plunged into my belly up to the elbow, and wrap my own aorta around my finger. I could press my thumb against my heart and feel myself live. I could pinch my lung and feel it expand under my fingers as I inhale.

I could pull my bellybutton open further, I could put both hands inside, and I could rearrange my spaghetti-intestines however I want. I could push them all up to the top, wedged against the stomach and the pancreas, and feel gravity drag them back down as I straighten up. I could take them out and string them across my arms like Christmas lights. I could reach all the way back and push aside my kidneys and trace my spine, outlining one vertebra at a time. Could I feel the nerves trails out, I wonder?

I wonder what kinds of contortions I would have to do to reach all the way up to the tip of the spine and tap on the base of my skull.

If I had a little alien mass inside, I could take out my womb and look at it. It would be like a water balloon. I could turn it inside out at there would be blue latex fused with the inside wall of my uterus. And there would be my little alien baby in a bath of runny jello, connected to me with a latex-flesh-umbilical chord.

I could pull the chord feel and toss the little alien aside, or I could pinch its little head and crush it, or I could toss the entire balloon away. Or I could not. I could tuck it back away in its upside down home, to feast on me some more. Or I could not. It’s mine. The blue latex is mine. I could. I might.

My hands drift from my navel up across my breast, around my neck, to the hollow of the base of my skull. My eyes are blurry in the window. Mine mine mine.

(the file also has the incomplete "Hands." and "Feet.")