Unborn

I woke up in darkness—total, smothering, warm darkness. No air, no sound. Just the steady thump of my own heart and something... thick pressing against every inch of me. At first, I thought it was a dream. Some abstract metaphor for anxiety or a claustrophobia nightmare. But when I tried to move—my elbows bumping slick, curved walls—I felt the resistance. Solid. Tight. And warm, like breath. It didn’t take long to realize I was trapped in an egg. Not metaphorically. Not “reborn” or “cocooned.” An actual, smooth, damp, grotesquely oversized eggshell. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it—the slight give of calcium, the grainy inside, and that dense, pulsing liquid sloshing around me like a too-warm bath. Yolk. I pushed. Of course I did. My palms met the wall, and I shoved with all the strength I had. It groaned. So did I. Pain lashed through my arms, like needles scraping bone. Not from effort. No. From the shell itself. It didn’t want to be broken. Each time I tried, the shell hurt me. Not bruises or burns. It hurt inside. Like memories being clawed apart. Like someone whispering every terrible thing I’d ever done in a voice that sounded eerily like my mother’s. So I stopped. For a while, anyway. I floated in that wet, warm stasis, drifting in and out of sleep. Or maybe I was dying and being reborn in slow motion. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t cold. But I could feel time—the slow stretch of it like a rubber band that never snapped. Then came the tapping. Not from outside. From within. At first, I thought it was my heart again. But this was... smarter. Intentional. A series of knocks against the shell, echoing in my skull like Morse code from something that knew me. Tap. Tap tap. Tap. “Stop,” I muttered. Or tried to. The yolk slithered into my mouth, thick as guilt, salty as tears. It tapped again. Eventually, it spoke. Not in words—don’t be so literal—but in meanings. Emotions carved out with scalpel precision. It asked why I thought I deserved to leave. Why I deserved to be born again. I didn’t have an answer. The shell didn’t let me lie. Every time I tried, it pulsed, triggering fresh waves of that internal agony—shame, regret, the kind you can't quite name but never forget. I thought about every cruelty I brushed off. Every moment I chose silence over speaking up. Every friend I ghosted, every parent I ignored, every “It’s not my problem” I muttered like a shield. Turns out, my shell was me. All my failures calcified around me like a second skin. A prison built from apathy. And breaking free meant confronting every shard. I stayed for what could’ve been weeks. Maybe years. The tapping never stopped. It asked and asked until I started answering—honestly. That’s when the cracks formed. Thin, at first. Like veins. But they burned. Oh, did they burn. Every fracture was a memory flayed open. But I didn’t stop. I pushed. I screamed. Not out loud, because I had no mouth, no lungs. But somewhere deeper—soul-screaming. Raw, ugly truth. The shell shattered. Light flooded in—cold, sterile, beautiful. I flopped onto the ground, slick with afterbirth and silence. Naked. New. But behind me, in the mess of broken shell, I saw it. The yolk was still moving. It hadn’t been mine alone. It was waiting for someone else. Maybe you.