Habit..

I crawl out of my fluid shawl..warm, enraged, pink and red ...sentences written across my temples..blue gelatin suffocating me..and my mother looming over a giant shadow, her angry heat blazing over me..

Can I climb over the iceberg?

Its frozen, its transparent juts will pretend to be meant for your trust and grasp..its ridges will covertly transform into transport and hooded accomplices will talk of safety on the way...and you'll clasp a knife of ice with your little fingers wrapped around it, and just as you begin to hoist yourself, you'll find the ice has held you forever...you're frozen and joint to the monster and you'll never be able to let go..naked and climbing an iceberg? Do you know it took centuries to shape a tiny cube made uneven by a chipped tray.

My rocking chair jerked frantically. The toes that hadn't formed yet shivered in anticipation. The cube was little and unwanted. You see, It had been tainted. At the very centre of its frozen beauty, say an accidental drop of blood. And since then, anger and astonishment had ostrasized the cube. It felt lonely and left out. It felt anger and apathy. It grew..it filled...with neglect and fear and hollow round holes in its enlarged core. And it took on a new name, because now, it had become large and strong and powerful..and had understood superstitions and tradition..and now when it laughed it became a terrible deafening roar that silenced people's hearts and made them afraid to think.

Turgid water balloons burst aginst my puckered angry fists. Silent rocking back and forth. I was the iceberg, the iceberg was me..we have so much in common..
Why couldn't I climb it?

The iceberg knew, and smiled through its slits of vision. It knew I could hear polite laughs and unnatural high pitches..it had known the permeability of amniotic fluid..and that its icy breath had snaked its way in, and curled aroud my brain...it knew my mother's fears..and my ancestral prejudices..it had sneered at the occasional Thought...and clamped its habitual forces around my arteries..I would never be free... free..I would never see the tinkling chains of tiny icecubes...wound around my willing wrists...each with a warm, red centre.

I could never climb it.

Unless I chose to.