I am Brandon, I am a man.

I was born on the day after Christmas 1976, boxing day in Canada. Boxing day is appropriate because I came out fighting, a cesarian. I never wanted to leave my mother’s womb, sometimes I’ve thought about constructing an artificial womb to live out the rest of my days inside. I think an exercise ball filled with warm pudding would be ideal. I would have some kind of breathing apparatus and when I got hungry I would just eat pudding.

My biological mother was a 15 year-old high-school dropout. My mother was weak, but my father was powerful, like a cumulonimbus cloud. I inherited this trait from him, power, sometimes I can feel his energy pulsing through my body as if it were electricity. My ears buzz and my heart booms and I feel like I could kill somebody with a simple touch of the finger. This energy sends me messages from time to time. They are messages from my father, from beyond. I never discovered this until I was about 15. I had been feeling the energy for some time, it would come and go. Then one day in the 9th grade I put my hand against my locker while I was feeling the energy and I heard an echoey, rattley voice that seemed to come from the metal. I drew my hand back and it stopped. I put my hand back and received my first message from my father: “Brandon, I am your father, I love you.”

My father has since told me a little about my mother and what led her to give me up for adoption. He explained that she and him had accidentally swallowed watermelon seeds and while they made her belly swell they made my father shrink down so small that he climbed into my mother’s belly button. He continued shrinking until he no longer existed as matter, he became a force that lives inside my flesh and blood. He has taught me so much and I am eternally in his debt.

I’ve never told a soul about this before, about my father, he instructed me not to. I feel the time is right, since I’m nearing the end of my life and he no longer lives within me. I don’t know how common or uncommon this type of relationship might be but I hope that these revelations might give others comfort in knowing they’re not alone. A comfort I’ve always yearned for myself. Is anybody out there?