08/31/2026
Forewarning: getting a bit personal.
I was looking through some footage/photos from last year and it brought up something that I’ve been wanting to share for some time. I was spending my weekends last summer up in the mountains, shooting for my song memori. I found out I was pregnant in July, the same week these underwater shots were taken. Only a couple weeks later, I’d find out that the pregnancy was ectopic and needed to be immediately terminated at risk of my fallopian tube bursting or worse.
When I look back, I can’t help but feel some cosmic alignment, seeing as I wrote this song about the near-death experience [ a festering desire to catch a brief glimpse of the other side. Unshackled. a blink of truth all revealed ] Little did I know, as I was floating in that freezing cold water, it went beyond metaphor.
Im still grappling with what the whole experience means to me. ☀️ One day you feel appointed by the divine. a tether between worlds. a portal to bring new life. The next you’re taking chemo drugs as some antibiotic. Blazing sun into vacuum. Bosch eye ⚫️
What I do know is that this whole experience has granted me a whole new vantage point. To possess a womb is the ultimate drug trip, dissolving any threshold for pain, grief, fear, love, divinity- proving that you can experience it all to its infinite ends, yet never combust.
Modern medicine has granted us some safety from what used to be wholly inevitable in circumstances like mine. My gratitude for that goes as deep as my anguish over what it’s still lacking. Not to mention the invasive policies over women’s bodies in this country. But thats a whole essay I’ll need to write for another day.
I think my experience has reshaped my priorities in many ways. I have a hard time caring about anything that isn’t directly tied to unapologetically nurturing the world around me. There is a sacredness in the role of mother that is so desperately needed, as a force against the rampant destruction and narcissism that seems to be plaguing the world. With all that said, I still hope to one day finish the ultimate creative project my body sought out to achieve, fallopian willing.
📹 chris burden
