The Fossil Egg

I am in two places at once. I am in suburban New Jersey, February 2011, and I am in wartime France, October 1944, with my grandfather and his fellow soldiers. They have just spent the night in a pup-tent near Omaha Beach when a rainstorm sends them outside to stand in the darkness next to fires, trying to warm up and dry off in the company of men who have been wounded in combat but are headed back to the front lines.

I cannot change the past.
But it feels so important to remember it.

How much are you in this world and how much are you in another?

You know the stories of women who walked around with calcified fetuses in their wombs, laboring daily as if they were carrying a large rock inside of them, which they essentially were? My new theory is that my head has turned to stone.

That what in my head should be made of space and balsa wood, so that I could fly my skull like a kite, has instead calcified and filled in, like a marble egg.

My head~the fossil egg.

I think this would explain some things. Why when I walk it’s like there is no cushion in my head, and each step I take jars things up above. Why there is fluid sloshing around in encapsulated areas, like underground streams in deep caves.

Some of those women miraculously went on to carry other fetuses to full term and to give birth to healthy babies.