Espejo

I feel as if I'm being torn apart, like the seams of my blood vessels are popping. Some mischievous little worm is splitting them. I live in a doorway. Purgatory. I'm right on that piece of wood that separates your home and the outside. In the crevices between pages in a book is where I lie. The ravines betwixt two houses. World War II's No Man's land. The place between my blanket and my bed isn't warm anymore.

How do you behave after surgery? Do you move on as if you have never had a problem? Do you act like you still have it? The immense monster that once bounced around synapses is gone. The cavern in my skull isn't filling up with rainclouds and octopus ink. The venom so greedily milked from rattlesnakes isn't the fluid surrounding my brain. What do I do with the stains they left on the bone? With the discoloring that the gray matter still bears? Do I bleach it out, do I ignore it? Do I behave as if it's still there and fear for every move I make?

Our job, as the outpatients and those in surgery is to be vulnerable. We are, in essence, a freak show. I mean that in the tenderest of ways. We are supposed to show our disfigurement, not to induce tears from children and screams from the bravest of men, but so that we can see a future past our pain. The scars on my wrist will always be there. They will always show when I get cold, or when I tap the skin. I cannot deny their existence. There will always be those instances of terror when my doctor goes "Where did you get that?" or when people admire a bracelet and ask what happened. The shameful adornment of my body... We can't forget it. To forget it would be to give it permission to try again. I can't live as if it never happened. As the song says "These scars remind me that the past is real". We have to live like those moments engulfed in tentacles happened, but not like we are still there. No matter how futile it feels, how we think we're still in the same trench we've been in for the past year, we've moved. If an inch, if a mile. We have moved. Share the scar of that place, the callous on your feet from the nails in the ground. You don't know who is there now.

That is a fact that I have forgotten... Forgotten that I have moved and gotten discouraged at the fact that I am not there yet. I will never be "there". I just have to make the best of here.