This is the first idea of my life.

I saw the place I was born in for the first time when I was nineteen. A shabby, suburban hospital in what had been a foreign country, a place I had only managed to piece together in my head from what my mother and my grandmother and the rest of the matriarchy had told me, those stories of faces and moments and landscapes I had never seen. And now I was standing in front of this grey, Orwellian cement structure from the sixties, towering above me and around me like some gigantic rock which somehow seemed so incredibly misplaced, surrounded as it was by the equally comfortable and banal familiarity of the brown and white houses which are London waking up and getting dressed and cooking breakfast and taking a train and losing each other for the day until we come back and clean and cook and eat and watch TV like a family. In reality the hospital was nothing other than normal, and surely not that tall, but it is always dangerously fearful to find the actual place you were born in, the place where you actually came out of your mother’s womb and started breathing for yourself because you never know what to expect, and you wonder whether you’re truly returning somewhere after a long trip or whether you had never been there in the first place. My mother had had to go into caeserean section because I was an uncooperative baby, having tied the umbilical cord around my neck like some Leaondean sculpture, cutting my air supply even before I had truly had it. I was blue when I came out, and in her doctor-recommended, drug-induced, cut-open state my mother had screamed at the doctors for bringing her an alien. It’s funny how most birth stories are either incredibly funny or incredibly sad, rarely being both. When I was younger I used to take some comfort in what I saw as being an ironic omen, the way my mother had thought I was alien and how I always wanted to imagine myself as a stranger in a strange land. And now I was here, standing outside, smoking quickly like a nurse on a cigarette break, wanting to go inside and hopefully see the doctor, the nurses, the whole team that was responsible for the fact that I was here, to go inside and talk to them, and have some kind of connection with them, the way people know and talk to their doctors and nurses in small places; like friends. Some part of me, some vanity, wanted for them to remember me, the special blue baby, as if pre-natal attempted suicide was something to be proud of, some mark of difference, as if it said ‘Look, I did it before puberty!’

These silly thoughts circulate in my brain every time I have to do something important. I imagine it’s my brain’s attempt to calm me down by imagining something entirely useless. I can’t go in, nobody’s going to know me and nobody will remember. The doctors and nurses will all be gone. But I can't leave. I can't leave until I remember the face of the midwife that massaged my tiny heart.

This is the first idea of my life. I have no idea where it came from, and why I have suddenly remembered it.