<![CDATA[In the Sea of Nun]]>The next disability blog carnival is on the topic “Story”. Which is convenient because I had meant to post this poem soon. Like most of my poems, it wrote itself and I had to work out the possible meanings afterwards. Some parts were obvious — the first part alludes to specific conversations with professionals in my life. Other parts I only had a feel for and struggled to put it into words.

I noticed two really important aspects of this story. It’s about the difference between my life as experienced by me and my life as defined by everyone from professionals to random others around me. It’s also about the intense lifelong passivity that (despite the best efforts of the professionals who pathologized it) I have only recently begun to break out of. Someone online once aptly described it as “leaf in the wind”.

About the unfamiliar words used: Ghin and foom are nonsense words intended to serve as placeholders for certain ideas in the story. The sea of Nun is an actual part of ancient Egyptian folklore, although this story I am telling is not a part of that folklore and isn’t intended to correspond to anything other than certain aspects of the water itself.

In the Sea of Nun

You told me I didn’t know what water was
I told you, “There is more to the sea of Nun than you could ever guess”
But you told me words were the only way to wisdom
Do you know what life is like floating without fins or flippers to move yourself from here to there?
Do you know what it is like before those words you hold so dear?
Have you been blown around in the currents?
Have you had to make your life wherever the water took you?
I may have seemed like a sleepwalker to you
Without the parts you use to guide and steer
But part of me has always been wide awake

I sit alone, and time is gone
You come in, and turn into a blur of movement and sound
I am like a statue watching living people fly past
But when I’m alone, time stands still for me again

In between your words is silence
In that silence is the world
Beneath all your ideas things come together on their own

I am awake when you call me asleep
I have a voice when you call me silent
I can navigate where you see only chaos
(In the waters of Nun)

The lines are twisting underwater
I feel them spread and branch away
They twist around the corner
They wrap around me sideways
They double, triple, even more
They slide around and up and down
And still it all makes sense to me
Or maybe it makes me to sense
Either way this is my home
And there is life in the sea of Nun

One day I woke up
There was more than the sea
There was a strange place
I found myself there
I didn’t go there
Make no mistake
I just was here then there

How can I describe it?
You have always had a ghin
What is a ghin?
It’s what you’ve always had
I don’t have a ghin
Something else was built
But how can I describe the building?

You have a ghin
You can never know the steps it took
I didn’t build it
It built up like collecting dust
So the dust settled on me
More dust
More dust
More dust
More dust
Eventually the dust hurt
And more dust
(Ow)

And then a mound of dust
A mound shaped a little like a ghin
But it was not a ghin
I will call it a foom
My foom tried to be a ghin
It had not the parts of a ghin
And the foom hurt
And the foom hurt
And the foom hurt
And you said “She is alive, she has a ghin”

And they all danced around
They looked at the foom
They touched the foom
They said “She is alive, she has a ghin”

“Where did she come from?”
(He pointed to the sea of Nun)
“Oh surely not there”
“Nothing from there is alive”
“Nothing from there has shape”
“Nothing from there is real”
“Nothing from there has a ghin”

They set me in the shallow water until I floated
They poked me with long sticks
They watched me bob around
They laughed

I felt the currents underneath me
They could not feel those currents
To them there is only chaos in the sea of Nun
They saw the part of me that was above the water
I lived in the part of me below

And they pushed, and they pulled
And I floated side to side
And they clapped, and they laughed
And the sea of Nun became my tears

I stopped moving
They threw a rope and pulled
I washed up on the shore
They formed a circle around me
Then they drilled me full of holes

They filled each hole with a different machine
And they whirred and they clacked
And I buzzed and I bounced
But the machines all fell out
So they pushed me back in the sea of Nun

And there I stayed and there I dreamed
And there the currents pushed me round
And there I drifted, there I slept
Until I grew flippers

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