The Story of My Birth
By Linnea Cooley
My mother and I don’t talk, so I don’t know the story of my birth. A girl with pink hair sits across from me at the coffee shop, smiling at me over her Americano. The girl tells me about astrology, and how the stars affect your personality and predict your life. It sounds very important. What’s more important is her toothy smile and the earrings that go up and down her ear.
“I have to know your birth time,” she laughs. “So I can know about you, so I can understand you!” I want her to understand me. I want coffee dates and smiles and late nights and touching and understanding.
My mother and I don’t talk, not like that, so I can’t just text her and ask her the time of my birth. I know my birth day. I’m an Aquarius. Moody, distant, and free-spirited to a fault. I was born in February in a hospital room in Boston. From this, I can imagine that it was cold outside and that the people on the street below hurried back to their cars. Perhaps it was nighttime and ice crystals formed on the hospital window. Or perhaps the morning light bled through the blinds. My mother sat in a hospital bed in a hospital gown. What did she sense of the daughter growing in her belly? Was my father there? Did he stand beside her, holding her hand? Was he happy? Was he sad?
On the day of my birth, comets hurtled by over the heads of mothers and fathers. Europa orbited Jupiter and Jupiter orbited the sun. Scorpio sprung across the eastern horizon the way children spring from their mothers. A black hole swallowed bits of cosmic matter and a cloud of dust collapsed into a star.
Linnea Cooley is a writer and essayist from the Bay Area. Her work appears in McSweeney’s, Pif Magazine and The Museum of Americana, and in 2020 she was a finalist for the Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize. Her work can be found on her website, linneacooley.weebly.com. or by following her on twitter @linnea_cooley.