How details slip between the cracks, like an absent-minded child eating a fruit, the excess juice lost between fingers and dribbling down chins. How overlooked, the prisms that exist in each moment, reflecting off a billion different stories, wavering away from their centers. A woman born of his rib? How simple it would be if this were true. But this woman, and thus all women, did not originate from singularity, but experienced multiple, simultaneous births. A woman born of his rib is a simplified melange of my nascence In him, I started as an infection. I surrounded myself in both his heart and lungs in a thick layer of mucus and nestled myself within his organs. It is true that I become hypnotized to the monotonous beat of a pulse: both his breath and his blood, and the rocking back and forth between the heat of his body and his cold inhalations. I would tickle his tonsils with my toes to make him cough, to make his body rattle and jolt while it carried me inside it. I spread my infection until his cough grew strong enough that I was able to jet myself out of his mouth and escape. Laying naked and covered in mucus and phlegm on the grass, I was his first word. He seemed disgusted with himself after I spat myself out. He grimaced, and I was his first curse word, his first affliction, first plague, and his first excretion. He believes that he is my creator because I took host in his body and thus came to resemble him, but he is mistaken, and I am not a derivative. I may have originated as a parasite, but I am no man's child.