A Dimmer on the Floodlight – Emily Buli

August 13, 2025

—

I was born with a floppy larynx. When the doctor pulled me out, I didn’t cry like a normal baby. I screamed so hard nothing came out at all.

“I thought you were dead,” my mom told me. “I begged the doctors to tell me you were okay, but they ignored me. Then, just before they whisked you away, I caught a glimpse of your face—bright red, mouth wide open, eyes watering from how hard you were trying to make yourself heard.”

I needed surgery, but it wasn’t safe until I turned one. Before that, I couldn’t breastfeed—I couldn’t even drink from a bottle. My mom had to feed me through a tube.

When I try to go back to the first year of my life, all those months compress into a single night, inside what looks and feels like a cave. I’m alone with my mom and she’s rocking me. We blur together in the dark.

Sometimes she sings to me. Other times she sobs. I’m not sure why. I’m only sort of there—asleep but poking my head out periodically to check that she’s still with me.

***

One morning when my mom opens the blackout curtains to let in the daylight, she accidentally rips down the walls along with them. The cave crumbles to a bleach-blue void, where there’s no white noise and no heartbeat but my own—racing faster, echoing mechanical.

My mom went somewhere and I don’t know where. I call for her—wheezing, half-formed screams that devolve into a fit of coughs. I’m throwing up, choking on the bitterness, something plastic jammed into the back of my mouth.

I smell latex and powder—feel bee stings all over my skin. I’m falling—swirling—orbiting something too full to comprehend.

The anesthesia didn’t work. I felt everything. I feel everything. And I can see it all in vivid detail:

knives glowing like shrapnel of stardust

my tiny body cut open at the throat.

I think I’ve always clung to language because it’s a soft filter—a dimmer on the floodlight of raw experience—but right now I only know mama. Mama, it hurts. Mama, can you shhh away the buzzing? There’s a blade coming at me—shredding through to an ultraviolet nerve beneath my protective outer layers. It drags me along through an ocean of syntax—trillions of letters exploding from a plasma-white core. I try my best to arrange them into something meaningful—something that will make it all make sense—

but when I make it to the center,

there

are

no

words.