I know the first time the wish seized me.

It was on the train, heading west along the coast. I had been there a few times before, an area known for fossils embedded in cliffs jutting white over the ocean. I walked a well-known cliff route from one town to another, looking down below, thinking of what was beneath my feet. I felt estranged from myself.

In the discipline of psychoanalysis, the baby is referred to simply as baby. It is the first other.

I wished to comport myself like the fossils below, at the whim of release by the movement of time, erosion. To compress and dissolve myself and extinguish the space between myself and the other.

I have often wondered about perpetual motion. When I remember the difference between a journey and an end state, my body entirely empties. There are parts to a whole and the dangers of the cliffs.

There is something startling about Newton’s cradle–I know there is something fundamental about it, but I can’t understand its implications. Two entities move at different times, yet in tandem. A relation is created, formed, and must be creatively tended. I am on high, I have the ability to form much more than you and I. The height difference between a parent and child. So much will happen if my mind hits yours.

On a different train, some hours into my journey, and some years from that first train, I find that a comfortable lull has finally descended. Most passengers in the train car have eaten, the shuffle up and down the aisles has ceased, and many are asleep or navigating the peaks of contemplation from their bunks.

Nothing is out of the question, is what I mean to say to myself. Instead, the words that ring out in my mind: nothing comes out of the question.

Winnicott says, “There is no such thing as an infant.” There is no such thing as an infant but there is a child. Or there is a space, hidden, that must be found.

Different filaments of order drift through my mind. In each of them, however, is the same overwhelming crush of togetherness as if seeping from a sinkhole, seeking from all directions.

Every week, I made rounds at a psychiatric hospital, as preparation for my analytic training. I sat among a circle of psychiatrists, social workers, doctors-in-training, and myself, as a woman.

She believed her insides were full of snakes. The chief doctor asked her questions but when she spoke, it was impossible to distinguish a yes from a no.

Winnicott says, “Without taking account of maternal care.” For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought women turned proximity to closeness into a heralded mission. Not that others can’t, but there is something we cannot shake about mothering. Everything with accelerated force volcanizes instantly.

Each ancestor had a child, but children are not always infants.

Two seats ahead sits a young woman with a yellow headscarf, totally still. By deduction, she must be facing forwards, either eyes down or closed.

Enigmas shuffle in order.

Talk to your angels, S imparted when he dropped me off at the train station. Nothing is out of the question, I repeat in my head.

Out of habit, I scan to see if anyone is watching me. Then I place my wrist against my mouth and slowly bite the skin on the right side. My tongue can taste something, remnants of soap. I let my wrist go, back down to my lap, and return my gaze to the window.

It is never enough to experience a loss. There is always a desire to see a form of violence written. The remorse that must be borne for experiencing it is a logic without end.

For a stretch of time, I imagined a wound underneath my ribs where I might have been hit, or–I didn’t dare to imagine too far–stabbed. As I walked home at night, these wounds that I did not have would throb.

It is impossible to look directly at it or, simultaneously, at anything else. Grasping at anything to ground me to the floor. A sudden change in temperature of sensations across the skin. Penitent Magdalene. Angels. I ask them to help me see more clearly.

Raff Patel is a writer based in New York City. They are the editor of the multimedia literary project Enter Bliss.