Where Was I Before I Was Conceived
Before the quiet spark,
before the first dividing cell,
I was not waiting in a chamber of stars,
nor folded in the breath of some hidden heaven—
I was not.
No corridor of memory holds that place,
no dream recalls a darker dream before it.
My mind, as neuroscience tells it,
is but a flame lit only when there is something to burn—
and I had not yet become the wick.
In the long arithmetic of biology,
I was possibility without witness,
a pattern not yet drawn,
a name not yet spoken
by any trembling mouth.
No silence held me,
for silence requires an ear.
No darkness wrapped me,
for darkness requires sight.
There was no “I” to be absent.
And yet—
the atoms that would one day gather as me
wandered the patient earth,
restless in stone, in water, in air,
ancient as the first light.
So I was not nowhere—
but I was not someone.
I was the unasked question,
the unwritten line,
the pause before language learns its own echo.
Then—
a sudden assembling,
a quiet ignition in flesh,
and the universe, for a moment,
learned to say my name
from the inside.
Before that—
no exile,
no waiting,
no loss.
Only the vast, indifferent peace
of never having been.
Yet, two names were picked out,
before I was conceived, the name for a girl or a boy.
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