🪐 𝚟𝚒𝚐𝚗𝚎𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚜 🪐

𝚍𝚎𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚍𝚎𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜

•short story•

Defining Our Defining Moments - concerning what makes us, us

There are many important days in our lives - I have mine and you have yours. These important days are not ordinary in the sense of an everyday occurrence but instead are extra-ordinary as they play a pivotal role in making us who we are regardless of if we want them to or not. They are our defining moments in our small time here on earth but you see I am far from extraordinary - I have no magical power and I am certainly no Wonder Woman - thus to be in keeping with my somewhat mundane nature I shall tell you a tale, not of extraordinary, fundamental moments that give structure and purpose to one's life but instead, a humble day before. This is a very plain, ordinary and somewhat overlooked day in a person's life and yet I find that it is these unassuming qualities that make them some of the most important days of our lives and our true defining moments.

The day before my birth it was cold: it probably even snowed and as a winter baby, I would like to think that it did. The snow is beautiful. It is blindingly mesmerising in the headlights as you drive towards it and yet, it makes everyone's Christmas when they wake to a patio coated with a sugar light film of freezing cold joy. November is touch and go at the least when it comes to snow but, I always imagined that when the clock stuck its twelfth chime of midnight while my mother was in the hospital, still pregnant with a stubbornly late child, outside there would be snow. The day before I was born there was peace - the prospect of a new-born seems to have that influence on people: the promise of the coming of a life; the birth of something pure and innocent. It just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy yet the peace was only surface deep. Snow is beautiful, enchanting, blinding and a herald of joy but it is also so much more. Snow is the ash of a roaring fire, dancing on the night sky like a dainty fairy floating back to earth. It's the icing sugar of the heavens pouring down on the mortals of the earth as a blessing upon us all. Snow is pure and innocent and like a child, it brings out the joy in even the most cynical of us all. Hence I wished it snowed so that the white dazzling flurry could usher me into the world in all its glorious magnificence.

This day is very important to me, as it was the moment before I came to truly exist. At this point in time is was simply a babe in her mother's womb - a concept yet to be fully realised - I was someone else's dream and that is a monumental notion. On this day my parents didn't know me and so just like I fantasise about the snow they too could only wonder about who I would be and I would become and that is a precious sentiment, an expectant mother gazing down at her swollen stomach wondering about the child inside her and I was their concept, their dream, their child.

Unlike the day before my birth I can remember the day before my sixteenth birthday with painful clarity. I can see it as sure as the sky above and the sea below, laying there clutching my body in pain- it is hard not to forget. My chest held a vice-like grip on my lungs and each rib pierced me like a surgical needle with every breath I drew. This was never how I envisaged the penultimate day to my oh-so-sweet sixteenth. Struggling, labouring over every breath like it was my last but this was no melodramatic teenage sitcom, this was real and it hurt. The day before it was my hips; that day it was my chest and tomorrow, it could be my head. At least that is what it felt like. This time, however, it was worse: my head was pounding as though someone was taking a sledgehammer to my skull. People who spend their time constantly in pain say that they relish it - the pain that is. They say it keeps them alive and keeps them sane - it allows them to feel. I don't. The pain well and truly hurts - it aches. When I wake up in the morning, I don't lay there and say 'another day to breath shallow breaths; another day to walk on aching hips; to nurse a migraine; to fall on weak ankles - praise the Lord for I feel pain.' No! Why on earth would I do that? Sleeping with a pair of cold grey crutches resting against the wall, just in case I wake up and I can't get out of bed, is not something that I relish and it is not something I am thankful for - not in the slightest.

Don't get me wrong I am most definitely not complaining; I just have to live with the fact that pain happens to be a defining feature in my tale but that doesn't make it a sad one. Everyone feels pain at some point in their life: emotional pain from bereavement; physical pain from injury or illness; mental pain from stress - they are all defining and shaping moments and thus play an instrumental part in our life at some point whether that be in the past; in living memory or even something that we are yet to experience. A famous philosopher Jeremy Bentham once said that two things dictate life - pain and pleasure - and we avoid the former and seek the latter but I feel he didn't quite understand that sometimes we must live through the pain and suffering to reach the pleasures in life. I know that there are worse hardships to go through in life than what I deal with and I am content to live out my days as an ordinary, pain feeling human that leads a mundane life. I am proud to be normal - it is what makes me who I am; my normality is my defining feature.

I find the same endearing quality within the humble day before; it's unassuming nature is what allows it to play such a monumental role in one's life. The day before is so riddled with normality it is truly the only day that can give an accurate portrayal of the ins and outs of what defines us. I don't believe that there is a more truthful depiction of one's character than how they act when no one is looking. Our behaviour when we are out of the spotlight - when we occupy our day with what is normal - is possibly the one and only true representation of ourselves and what our life is like. That is what makes the day before so special, the day before my birth and my sixteenth couldn't be more different: in one I was an infant cocooned in my mother's womb, safe and secure, and the other, I was in deep and intense pain. However, these two somewhat ordinary days are two defining moments in my story. In essence, these normal days make me who I am: an ordinary girl who is proud to be normal.

1230 words