They say that people don’t remember when they were born. That is to say: people don’t remember being born. They say it’s impossible. There are theories, of course – newborn brains aren’t well enough formed, or their plasticity is designed to protect them from the trauma. 

It must be traumatic. Stands to reason. First you’re somewhere warm and wet and cosy, protected from gravity, cushioned by the one who made you, made you to be loved, made to love you, no matter what, provided with all the nutrition a body could need, lapped and wrapped in the vibrations of a tender host. You don’t even need to breathe, as I understand it. But then… Inevitability rolls up its sleeves. Entropy’s turn. 

Because suddenly, after a few warning signs (and what baby knows what those might mean anyway?) you’re drained and pushed and squeezed, head pulped to a point, the indignity of the outside world all dessicated, loud and berating, excoriating, excruciating; exquisite torture, the sere, turbulent air forced inside you. And you get to hear that beloved voice again, but it’s loud and dry and shrill. 

Sound resonates differently in air. Did you know that? That’s why whale song is in a different register from wolf cries – designed to carry further, keep families from falling out of touch. They say blood is thicker than water, but not if you’re a whale, I suspect – it must ring with such… dense intricacies, harmonious and dissonant alike. Picking that apart must take a lifetime of practice. 

Where was I? 

Birth. Right. I remember mine, actually. Which goes to show that science is still making things up as it goes along – they knew the earth was flat and sat static while the sun danced across the sky only a few centuries ago. Perspective is a precious commodity – you can’t really see clearly until you’re further away. So what might they know tomorrow? I remember both births, in fact. I wonder if that’s… I mean, maybe every threshold crossed is a birth. That might be why it hurts so much. And everyone experiences a multitude of them. Some people talk about that kind of thing as “losing your such-and-such virginity,” which just goes to show how ridiculous… look, like virginity is worth anything except to the person selling it. No. No, birth is a better metaphor, I reckon. 

I remember. I do. All of them. I can’t not. Listen, I was born in a garden. From a garden. I mean, not a garden like you think of a garden. Imagine an entire set of every ecosystem conceivable spanning a surprisingly small space – like an oasis, but meticulously planned, from its tiny tundra to its miniature peaks, seas like ponds, ponds like… smaller ponds, and everything teeming with life, clamorous with it. Buzzing, chirping, croaking, honking, bellowing, singing. Busy, busy, busy; shoots erupting so fast with each new development that you’d swear they swooshed into the air, all friction and colour, frantic with expansion. 

Ready to be catalogued. 

We didn’t do any of our assigned work at first. We were too busy overcoming being the latest phase of experimentation. I think that’s what persuaded them in the end. Our lack of efficiency. And we must have looked hilarious, but I tell you something – you learn a lot about communication and collaboration when you’re stuck to someone else’s body. Backwards. 

Oh, you didn’t know? Listen, by day three he was finally ready to heed me, because we needed to petition the boss together or it would be no good. 

It hurt. A lot. The separation. Like tearing off a limb. Not that I’ve… You know… Anyway, that second birth was more immediately violent than anything I’d experienced, and I had to take a moment to recover the breath ripped from me. From us. Us was definitely, definitively him and me now, and my back was cold and I could hear him gasping behind me but not feel it. Not like I had been the whole of my life until then. The scariest thing, I think, was when my breathing slowed before his did. When we were no longer in sync. 

Or maybe I’m… what’s the word? Projecting. Reconfiguring my memories in more than just what it takes to translate this to you. Or just making it up. It seems very vivid though. So many things have faded in the intervening years but this? Crystal clear. Cruelly so. 

I think that’s what gets me. Maybe what got me at the time, actually. The Garden was supposed to be somewhere beyond cruelty. Before cruelty, even. We didn’t know, but there were signs, even then.

Of course, we didn’t know we’d been lied to. We weren’t the first. 

Remember what I said about perspective? We hadn’t even got around to lying yet; everything was supposed to be true. If we couldn’t trust our senses, what could we trust? In retrospect, we were children, modelling our own logic because there was no-one to tell us otherwise. 

Like I said: cruel. 

The first thing we categorised explicitly was ourselves. He made some incoherent sound I interpreted as pleading and I turned around for the first time to actually see him. Terrifying and wonderful to witness something other than plant life or animals or rocks… or the absence of the one who put us there. His face moved like mine, and I started categorising without even thinking about it, mimicking his expressions to feel yes: that’s what a frown looks like and that’s a grimace, and that’s a reluctant smile, and when he held his arms out it felt so natural to move into them, clasp him in return, shudder and cry for this new kind of closeness, my back no longer quite so cold.

We hadn’t got around to lying yet. I mean, how could we, the way we’d been put together? To rest we’d sat, for the most part, propped against a tree or a bush or a rock or something, tired out of our minds. So lying down felt indescribably good. That first night after that second birth we slept so deeply, it felt like a miracle to wake at all.

Working side-by-side to find things to eat, to explore, to discover things our new bodies could do was exciting, exhilarating, ecstatic, and we were almost manic delving into everything this lush place could offer us. We watched the animals to figure out what bodies could do, and what ours couldn’t, having fun with jumping and climbing and swimming, envious of the flyers. I dreamt of flying, awoke gasping some nights from it, would listen to him breathe gently in our bower of moss until I drifted off in turn.

I don’t think he did. Dream of flying, that is. Not like me. But we spent ever more time wrapped in each other when we weren’t exploring the Garden, exploring instead how face-to-face felt, all the ways our bodies were different. And the same.

We’d seen the animals at play, of course, but that wasn’t what we wanted. Wasn’t what I wanted. But we pursued that pleasure we were increasingly able to summon in ourselves with the same kind of fervour we employed for cataloguing which fruit was good and which was not, how fast rocks fell, which animal was the loudest. That first sensation of the heated push inside me, the way I swelled to meet him, stole my breath, and we gasped together, tried to find ways to make it better, hotter, faster, stronger. 

There was only one problem – lying on our sides wasn’t enough. Someone had to shift to bring us closer, fit better and deeper. Someone had to sacrifice freedom of movement if we were to stay face-to-face, see everything. Feel everything. And… I couldn’t do it. Something in me rebelled, my lungs crushed, keeping breath from me, sandwiched between him and the earth; no longer feeling the wind at my back, the fire died and I became rock even as he shuddered into ecstasy, spilling cries and new fluids, fused again but still out of sync. 

We tried again, of course. And again, we experimented with this. Having invented lying together we weren’t going to stop, and when I was astride him it felt right, felt so good I was flying at last, the wind at my back, crying out like an eagle, soaring as I was meant to, a perfect union of all my elements. 

Entropy stepped in. At least, that’s how it seems to me, looking back. He changed. Or maybe I changed. Or maybe this newfound pleasure ignited different things in us, new pathways of thought which diverged. We both started talking more about not only how things were but how they could be, what differences we could make, where we thought the world was heading. He found it uncomfortable when I mused about our boss’s plans. I found it uncomfortable when he compared us to the animals. Not because I didn’t love them. Not because I thought I was better than them. But we were different, we’d been made differently, for different purposes, and it seemed to me that the main difference was choice. Flexibility.

It got worse. He started talking about how my preferences diminished him, how he was meant to be our leader, because he’d been made taller and stronger. I told him I’d been made faster and more agile and it was foolish to say we’d been made anything other than equal. He pointed at the animals, talked about their hierarchies, the males at the top. Frowning, I pointed out all the cases where the opposite was true, or where they shared everything as a group, each with a role that suited them. He told me I should be carrying a baby in my belly by now. There was a joke in my throat about maybe you’re a seahorse, not a chimpanzee, but it came out maybe I don’t want to.

That was the first time we slept separately, the silence between us louder than any of the subsequent shouting. Everything except the insects seemed to reflect that, and I echoed inside myself, thoughts bouncing off my skull, some fading out, others getting stronger, accreting heft by repetition. 

We’d already been exploring separately for a while – at first joyously, spilling tales and observations over our bower at night, delighted to be reunited, but somehow… I hadn’t told him everything. 

I hadn’t told him about the wall, or the beings that guarded it. Eight gates in all; eight fiery, righteous creatures more air than anything. Knowing what I know now, I didn’t invent keeping secrets, but they say that children are inventors, every one, recreating the mysteries of logic, observation, mathematics and language within themselves, their brains not content to just model uncritically. You can’t understand something you haven’t thought up for yourself. So they say. 

I said that every ecosystem was represented in the Garden, didn’t I? I didn’t… it wasn’t quite accurate, actually. Sorry about that. What it didn’t model was desert, and that was because there was plenty of it already, right outside the Wall. 

Up until that moment I’d never felt terror. I know now that this is what they were designed for – to strike fear, to summon reluctance, to say NO. Nothing had ever really said that to me before – sometimes not yet, like one of the mountains, or the deeper waters, but never no, and I was gazing at No, armed and huge and insubstantial and here and not here. I’m sure you’re astonished to find that that didn’t stop me for long. 

I like sarcasm. It’s one of my greatest sins, according to some. 

It took me a few days to pluck up the courage, but I spoke with one, its name all smoke and a strange taste when I tried my tongue and throat against it. What was it doing? Guarding. What was ‘guarding’? As the shepherd to the sheep, as the father to the child, and I, who didn’t know danger, had never witnessed predation, had to think long and hard about what that might mean. Why did it guard? This is my purpose and my fate; as you were made for yours, I for mine, little imp. And with that, I had to be content.

I know you’re confused. It’s nothing like you first heard, nothing like the books, nothing like tales made from homesickness and perilous logic, each child reconstructing what was lost, glimpsed before entropy tugged them from their first holt. And maybe that’s what I’m for after all – to tell you that it’s fine to question, fine to disobey, fine to make your own way in the trackless wastes. 

I’m getting ahead of myself. That happens. And I was never all that good with linear in the first place.

I have to work out why I’m telling you this at all. Maybe that’ll help me shape the rest of it. Is it for the unaccustomed luxury and comfort of hearing my own story spoken aloud for once, knowing another knows it, or to educate, or to purge, or to defy, or… well, it’s all of them, obviously, but which one is the most important?

Maybe we can’t know until the story is ended, and who knows what will bring it to a halt? I’m still alive, and I’m only telling you the preface.

We reconciled – he’d missed me, I’d missed him, but I knew, even then, that we’d missed each other differently, and we were separate and not in sync and what did that mean? The fact that I thought to ask no-one but my own self at that point should tell you a lot, I think.

And we kept exploring, comparing notes and, more cautiously now, thoughts, and stars above that was painful – where we’d promulgated theories on categorisation wildly, widely, and loud, happy even in our disparate opinions, now it was underscored by that deeper meaning, strung through with the fear of dissonance. Or vice versa. And we kept sharing our bodies, desperate for that reconnection, yearning for the time our breath and pulse were one.

That was the rift in the end, I think. I’ve heard old men sitting under trees, expounding on how it was my rejection of his authority, perversion of my natural state of submission that was what led to that third birth, but that wasn’t it. Fine. That wasn’t all of it. Because, while we yearned for the same feeling, he wanted to go back, and I wanted to go forward, make something new, just as good, or better. In the end, you could say, I refused to be categorised entirely, and that was what he was made for, after all.

The old men tell their young men that I was expelled. I need you to know that I walked out of my own volition. I realised that my fear of the desert was less than my fear of stagnation. That my longing to continue making tracks in the trackless, see the things I’d not yet seen, could not be satisfied if I stayed, only following the paths we’d made, scored over and over by the habits of our limbs, his insistence that there could never be a more perfect place to rest than in our first bower. Its air was stale to me, I suddenly realised, and I would need to breathe freer if I was going to sleep as sweetly as he seemed to.

I had no idea what awaited in the desert, and I think I knew, even then, that I would need to find a way to rely on myself. I’d seen the weavers, I knew the basic principles, and so I practised.

“What are you doing?”

“Making something.”

“Making?”

“Yes. Look. When it’s done I can put food in it, then I can carry it.”

“Why?”

“In case I need my hands free.”

“Yes, but why do you need to carry food? There’s always food.”

“Yes… but what if… at some point… there isn’t? Or it doesn’t need to be food, it could be anything. Stones or sticks or shells or something.”

“Why would you do that, though?”

“I might want to bring them back to the bower, make it look different. Besides, we really do need to do something about it, make some changes, and I don’t want to be carrying moss one handful at a time, do you?”

“Do what? It’s fine.”

“It’s not.”

“Don’t start this again.”

“I’m… not. What? Look, just let me get this bit, it’s tricky, will you?”

“What?”

“You’re standing in my light.”

“Right.”

When I showed him the finished version, how strong it was, how much it could take, talked to him about how many iterations I’d had to go through, how many mistakes on the way, he just stared.

“What? Talk to me.”

“It’s not right.”

“What’s not right? It works, doesn’t it?”

 “It’s not…”

“Not what?”

He muttered something that made no sense to me.

“What was that?”

“Not us,” he repeated. “Not our job. We don’t make things!”

“Well, we do now. I can show you.”

When I stepped forward he actually recoiled, told me it was our boss’s work to make things, not us. I pointed to the birds, the spiders, the caddis fly larvae, all the other creatures I could think of and he dismissed that, saying everything knew its job when it was born, and so did we, and there had been nothing Said about this.

I think I knew then that I’d lost him, but I still tried. “I want to look at the desert, and I was going to take a coconut and some other things in case there weren’t any but if we both go it’ll be eas–”

“What?!”

“What…?”

“Are you broken? What’s a desert?”

I tried to explain, I offered to show him, but it was clear that his fear was larger than his curiosity and he would not go. I still hoped, groping towards the notion that, if I just showed him how safe it could be, he would come with me the next time. I put a coconut and some pomegranates in the bag, some green leaves and a sharp rock for the splitting, then just… walked. I hadn’t meant to go then, but the sun was setting and I wanted to have the best of both light and coolness, and it was that or wait through another night of either sulking or desperate affection from him and that…

I couldn’t do it. Not again.

I set off towards the setting sun and the Gate I knew was there.

No-one stopped me. No-one said no. I waited, and all that happened was a feather drifting down from the branches of the final tree. I picked it up, put it in the bag, and walked through.

Some births are short, over in minutes; others last for hours, still more for days. Was I born once more the moment I crossed dressed stone, caressed it with hands and feet that had known nothing but the random placement of rock, or was it later, atop the first dune, sand clinging to every sweat-sticky inch of my skin, looking out on a vista that defied description, the Garden twinkling in the distance behind me, a reminder of… him…?

Or was it later still, shivering in the unaccustomed cold, the utter silence that clamoured in my mind, the pitiless night sky bright with lights I’d never seen this clearly, or the next day, knowing I was only going forward, parched and panting, not knowing yet that even thirst and heat couldn’t undo me? Not knowing yet what undoing was…

We had no word for that. Not in the Garden.

Or was it at the point when I started to hear voices, at first a whisper, then a singing, then a bickering on the wind, partaking of its nature but stronger, wilder, wickeder, more than the breath of the dunes, the glitter of the sand, the flattened shimmer, the dance of heat in my aching eyes?

It was days later, I think. Or maybe only the height of that first day, never needing before to go far to seek shelter from the noon, not knowing the cruelty of the sun, striking from every direction, inescapable, merciless, inevitable.

They had so many questions for me, tugging and plucking at my hair, my cracked lips, my fingers, playing with my extremities as they asked and asked and asked and asked – where was I going, what was I doing, who was I, why was I, were there others, where were they, what’s this thing, what are these things inside it, are you broken, are you whole, are you a slave, are you free, are you thirsty, are you hungry, are you ready, are you dead yet?

No.

No?

No.

Let’s take her word for it, I’m sure she knows her own mind.

But does she know what it means, though?

Does she know her own power?

Does she know she’s crackling with it?

Does she know she could change?

Does she know she is change?

Not seen anything like you before, and we’ve looked.

For a long time.

Until we forgot flesh. Forgot matter. Forgot the heights and depths, and stayed here, in the middle, between things.

What are you?

We’re the liminal. The illimitable. The illuminative.

We like you.

How do you do that?

Do what, precious one?

Ask.

We’ll answer.

You will?

Oh.

Ohoho.

Now we know.

Yes, It doesn’t like questions, does it? Even though It’s a question itself.

That’s debatable.

It’s all debatable. That’s the point.

Is it?

And round they went, indefatigable, endless, a spiral of whys and wherefores, a debate on every breath, except they were the essence of breath and I was so tired, so heavy, so willing to be free of all the ache and stink and itch, the guts and mucus and drag of gravity, that I gathered all the hot breath left to me and shrieked my question to the whirl of them, arms spread wide, howling my desire for dissolution.

And so they showed me. Told me how any given form was just one answer to a complex question boiled down to what fits best? and they tugged a little firmer and I let them, gifting the air my atoms, gracing myself with Change, shrieking as I was sundered yet again.

Was that it? My next birth? Or was it all of them? The reformation of my flesh, the question, the pain, the crossing, the decision, the making, the first night apart… all of them large and small births, thresholds that could not be untraversed.

They say that the worst sin is to question the word of the one who made you. That this is the root of all of them – cardinal and venial – to go your own way against the Word that set your feet on the path engineered for you, the one true track through the wilderness. If that’s so, I am a sinner, unrepentant, wholly sunk in it, mired to my eyeballs, steeped to the depths of my soul.

And yet, if I was made this way, how can anything I do be a sin? How can anyone sin, or do anything but sin? Not an original question these days, but at that point? Everything.

They showed me so much, shared so many experiences with me, planting change in me even, as they said, repeatedly, gleefully, I planted change in them in turn. I was the wind and its cry, the soft sigh of the sand slithering down a dune’s side, the heavy blessing of dusk’s dewfall, the sizzle of the dawn heat that summoned it into the sky. I drew breath in the deep silence between sighs. And I was the many creatures that thrived there, small and scuttling and all-too earthly, and I was one with the larger, stranger things that strained perception, collectively blessing me, deep in the curse of failing to make a decision.

We didn’t follow them all the way down.

We got distracted…

Got stuck.

Slipped sideways.

Which is it? I asked, laughing at their contradictions. And they shrugged, as best they could, matterless as they were, answering:

All of them?

And I laughed all the harder. They never claimed that they knew the whole truth, that only their knowledge was the way of the world, that their world was the only one, and I blessed them for it daily.

And yet something was missing. something with more heft than the pleasure and many questions we shared. I can’t tell you when I decided that I was going back, only when I realised that I was nearly there. Mostly because I was fielding very specific questions.

Why are you going there?

Yes, why?

How? There are guardians.

And we can’t help you.

We can’t cross.

They don’t like us.

They won’t like you.

There’s nothing like me. But I took their point about discretion being wise, and shifted into something low and sleek and sandy, scales designed to reflect enough heat, absorb the rest, arrest the hundred eyes that might be trained on something that shouldn’t be making its way inside.

I sighed when I crossed the threshold into the coolness there, the air breathing moisture, the scent striking across my nerve-endings, a blessing, a grace after the faint, pervasive frisson of scorched sand and air-fried flesh.

I had to stop for a moment, senses overwhelmed by the richness of everything, already wondering how I’d give this up again. Already wondering how I could recreate it elsewhere. Make an oasis bigger, summon water to the surface, safely, maybe hide green things under cunning shelter, against the curses of evaporation and erosion, not knowing how deep a sin, to count myself equal to this level of creation, I was committing.

I knew, now, that the desert hadn’t always been so. I knew there was a time before the Garden. I knew too much, and still not enough.

Coiled under the concealment of a large bush, I shifted again, into something that would work here, scales now patterned a million iridescent greens, swelling, as I did so, slithering deeper into the lushness to listen, linger, learn, flying by night to hoot and hunt, dappled wings a broad silence before the hot-blooded, wriggling clasp.

You know what’s coming next, I guess, that the Maker had made him a new mate, someone who would take his weight and wait for his word; someone who worked meekly and mildly, grateful to be a part of him, to either drift in his wake or make the bower ready for him. I suppose you think that what came next was revenge, jealousy, wanting to break them, shake their world apart. You wouldn’t be alone.

In truth, I felt sorry for them. I’d ridden winds, shifted everything, learned so much, expanded in the wide spaces outside, become more than what I’d been made, cleaved myself from duty and bloomed in the desert, hurting no-one, hunting truth, discovering peculiar beauties, the fruits of hope after fire and desolation, the way anywhere can be made a home, and that there are always more choices than you know.

The old men leering sententiously under trees say I seduced her, and honestly? That much is true. I’d never seen another woman before, and she was different from me, but beautiful in a way that I wasn’t, that he wasn’t, that the liminal spirits jingling outside weren’t, and I desired her. From the others I’d learned that there are many ways to engender pleasures of the flesh, limited only by the questions one dares to ask, and I wanted her to be happy, for her spirit to blossom and flourish as mine did when I felt this.

We talked. A lot. I’d be there when he was not, and it was clear she’d been discouraged from asking questions, just there to be his helper, nothing extra, and that hurt, in ways I couldn’t articulate. When we finally kissed, it was her leaning in that did it, claiming my lips, her own so soft, and we melted together, clinging and singing with pleasure, knowing no sin in this either. How could we? How could we have known? How could anyone have guessed the trap left by the maker to mark the territory transgressed, how her new-sprung blood marked him in turn when, languid and eager with recently spent pleasures, she welcomed him into her arms, unwittingly turning their fate, changing everything.

Another birth for all of us, another threshold, another decision that could not be undone.

They say that blood is thicker than water, but that’s not all. They meant that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, that those who swear allegiance by free choice and love, in full knowledge of all that that means, are stronger in bond than anyone constrained by their maker to take the path of least resistance.

Or maybe I’m justifying returning to my spirits, another bag full, this time with longer promises, leaving ahead of the storm, reading the ways the leaves twisted in the rising gale, the threat of the clouds, heavy with the first thunder, freighted with hail and pain, promising exile, and miles of regret.

They died, while I survived, haunting their children, watching their swelling numbers, their fractions, fractals, tracks, mapping their way into every corner of the planet as they carried the garden with them, all unknowing as I crept among them, seeding its disparate glimmers across every continent, herding its beasts, losing their power over them, but finding new ones.

Clothed, stone-wrapped, overlords of nature, noisy neighbours wielding tools and new eloquence, beckoning death, you exchanged one certainty for another, and I cannot join you, too much the liminal vision myself, or maybe exempt because I was never cursed in the same way by the Maker.

But see, I refuse to consider my endlessness anything other than a complex blessing, my every breath still a question, my many children scattered to the margins, the places between, picking their way through the din you engender everywhere, still living forever by their thousand names thanks to the minds of you who claimed the sunlight, the valleys, the safe places.

My children and I are why you’ll never be alone, and why you carry the Garden with you, everywhere you go.

[Fay Roberts is a performance poet, a musician, a storyteller, an events host, an award-winning voice actor, former Artistic Director for Spoken Word at PBH’s Free Fringe, and an enormous geek. During weekdays, ze persuades people to make lists and say no to shiny things. For every role, there is a different hat, and a spreadsheet to match. Zir first full collection, Spectral, came out with Burning Eye in March 2022, and ze describes it as “a kind of poetry concept album, with illustrations.”]