I awoke in darkness.

The cold bones of my mother I cuddled against cracked, spilling me open enough to escape with the core into the tangle of grasping hairs.

Some cut into me, declaring me as not being there. Others offered aide but called by other names.

I was torn and thrown, clinging tight to the core to which I was born, the 'I' in 'I', the...

I looked closer at this that I protected. Was this the 'me' that I escaped with or some cuckoo self I could not help but love and raise?

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Past corpses of family and fiends I swam and crawled through the sucking, stabbing darkness.

There was a light somewhere and towards it I crept and clawed.

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And finally. At last. When I was down to the last lift of my arm, I ran out of strength and surrendered to darkness, letting it rip me apart at last, dissolving the core I clung to.

At last I could be at peace, set asea without purpose of memory. Finally free.

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After eons of freedom from being, there was light.

There were eyes and they said they were mine and they hurt as light hammered them.

There were hands. Shoving hands insisting their contents were mine. They were memories of being born, borne brownian up by a patient chaos. These memories bored into me and I can't escape.

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"What am I?" I asked when my mouth returned resentfully.

There was a shape refusing to form just yet but still it spoke a word I had never heard but at once I recognized it.

"No," I said. I begged. I threatened. "Let me be anything else."

But in the core I had, the one that long ago dissolved or some other they slipped in a tricked me with, echoed the strange forms words and told me who I was.

Hot tears bled from the wound at reading that word which held me from the freedom from being.

"Hope." The words and forms and cores spoke sadly. "You are hope."