I don't know if I feel like the womb or the baby but it is stuck in forever being born to someone else. It is the idea that my body will be taken over by parasites that is so disgusting to me. If the awful looks of people who look like soul deadened cows you whiz by on the highway could crucify you bare feet to kitchen floor. If this lady asking that could just make the two babies become mine.

I was visiting in Alabama and some stranger made some comment that two infants sitting near me were mine. Easily the most offended I've ever been in my life happened when I was a teenager. I'm afraid of red faced screaming infants and their tiny fists beating on my insides. I am jinxing myself now, probably, by marveling that I haven't yet had a nightmare of pregnancy from one after the other of bodily oozing lifeforms. These days I feel like I've been absorbed into a Rosemary's Baby womb. And once I was a deer stalking myself, and it was then (I know well the hour when I called myself a dyspeptic), for my son's good, that I thought up a name that would keep him in stomach and make him definitely a child of destiny, giving him, in place of your gift to me (which was a too gentle, twofold, many-sided instability), the appellation of 'Cock o' the Walk' or ***. Yet again, I am a man-with-a-trowel, digging at the edge of my life for the tangible substance of recreation and once I was a bird who flew down my own throat, twanging at the heart chord, to get the pitch of my own mate-call. At other times this face, is it not a dowager's? Sometimes I am a whore in ruffled petticoat, playing madly at a pack of ruffians, and getting thrippence for my pains a smartly boxed ear, or, a bottom-tingling clap a-hind.

At one moment I am a young and tender girl, with close-held legs, and light bones becoming used to the still, sweet pain that is a girl's flesh, metaphorically speaking, of course. I am all things to men, and all women's woman.

Djuna barnes books