The Sorrows of Young Bernard

Is it appropriate to give a name to the cells that make up your colon, beyond calling them 'colonic cells'? Should we individually call each of our skin flakes after things that take our fancy? Do we name the hairs on our head, or the veins that run to our heart, or the cancer growing in our bowel? 'Of course not!' the people cry. Then why name the collection of cells that we flush out with a morning after pill? It was no more a being than our femur. And yet...

It was nothing. A fusion of two reproductive cells, that in a short space of time gathered a scientific idea of what it was to become and set to work building and forming. Unbeknownst to the diligent cells, this formation was unwanted. After six weeks of furtive construction and realisation, the cells were stopped in their path, and killed. The reasons for this are unimportant, but if it makes the moral purists out there feel better it was because the pregnancy in question stemmed from the incest rape of a minor, or for the social cohesionistas, it was rape of the financial kind, a couple incapable of raising a child in a cruel, uncaring, bourgeois world. Like that, building stopped, cells stopped in their tracks and withered away. The mass came out, in its own humiliating way, punishment enough to the mother who had to watch her instinctive calling flush down the toilet quite literally. And that was that. Back to the checkout counter, or the law degree, or life on jobseekers. But the tale is not over for the thing that could have been, not by a long shot. On the contrary, the story is neither just beginning nor ending, but floating somewhere in the infinite inbetween. To better illustrate, it would be provident to follow the cell mass into the toilet, beyond notions of purgatory and afterlife, into a future more plausible and infinitely more exciting than any notion of heaven or hell.

Travel, traverse, transcend. Onwards and upwards. Take one step forward and two steps back. The trick is not in the destination, but in the journey itself. Upon that toilet flush an opening is made to bigger and better things, far beyond the ken of mere mortals. This abortion is privy to the workings of the known universe. Don't believe the lies spun by the pro-life lobby, a terminated future is far greater than any tangible time-lined concept of life.

To tap out is to tap in, the stream full of the gazelles of the plains, those who have given their throat to the fangs of death. They know, in their dying moments, what is waiting beyond their death, beyond the meal that sustains the predator for a week or so, beyond the scraps that the buzzards pick.

Energy.