It’s dark in here, dark and warm, like a caramel-coated living room. A capsule of yummy gooey stuff. It’s been twelve years since the night I spotted my new mother and father meet and fall in love. That’s twelve years of praying and waiting and observing. I think I’ve earned a good rest, a sleep of meringues and cream. I think I’ll sleep like this for about eight months and sixteen days. I’m going to sleep and dream of sheep.
All the tranquillity in here makes me forgetful. I don’t know if it was the journey or just being here safely, but I’m forgetting things. I can’t locate stuff inside my brain. Where did I put that other memory anyway? My last recall of the crystal forest – I know it’s inside here somewhere, or did I leave it behind?
Faces from other lives, numbers, ideas, names I knew a moment ago; vroom, it’s all leaving me now, and I don’t really care. I’m footloose and fancy-free, starting all over again. I do hope I’ve packed all my important characteristics. I can’t remember if the boys made it along and I can’t see anything because I’m all groggy, and after the rainbows and iridescent radiance of heaven, I can’t make anything out in the darkness. It doesn’t matter; nothing matters now. I’m here, safe as houses in my mummy’s tummy, and nothing else in the entire world exists.
In ten days’ time Rahla and Jason will go for a scan and they’ll take a picture of me, but I’ll sleep through the moment when they get their first sight of me. Fast asleep and dreaming of a new life, I am the luckiest fish in the world. Yay for me, yay for everybody!