Your mom and dad have a strand of ultrasound pictures. The strand is six frames long, arranged horizontally, matted against glossy black backgrounds from which you emerge as a bright ghost of Northern Lights. A General Electric logo is stamped into the upper left-hand corner of each picture.
The first two images, traditional 2D snapshots, capture your right profile. You have a slight overbite, a slighter chin, and a nose that, your mom insists, is shaped like your dad's. Your eyes, the back of your head, and your spine form the shiniest curvatures of your constellation, while you point upwards with your index finger, not accusatory, but revelatory. Like an idea just came to you.
The other four shots are taken in "4D." Your dad is baffled as to how the minds at GE make "time" a capturable element on pictures -- or perhaps your dad is baffled that all pictures don't already capture time and isn't that the point?
In the 4D images, you are sepia-toned throughout, brown and shaped from clay, always reaching with your left hand, that pointing hand, to grasp and ungrasp your umbilical cord, clinching and releasing the nourishment coming from your mom. Your right arm is straight, your right hand out of sight, as if finding where your dad clips his pen into his pants pocket.
Your mom and dad have video, too, over thirty minutes. The obstetrician measures your head and spine, forearm and upper arm, labeling heart and kidneys. Sizing you up, the obstetrician declares that you land in the 52nd percentile, directly in the middle of the pack, as far as sizing goes. Your dad couldn't be more ecstatic that his baby is perfectly average. And throughout the video, still you point, and then grasp the umbilical, and then release, keeping appraised at all times of the cord's location, and letting go only as another idea comes to you.
