Defined By Our Wounds

Years ago in the blue house, Frida reminded me of what Franz Kafka (who I like to call Frank) told me years before. “We are,” she said from behind her monkeys, from beneath the glass, from above the bed, frozen in the mirror, “We are defined by our wounds.” For this reason I never corrected the scar. It is one that runs across the neck, stretches to the shoulder, down into the chest. The scars on the thighs from being peeled like an onion to acquire some small layer of skin to craft an earlobe, the bursting oval scar above the right breast where a drain was once installed. Today for the first time this year I have worn short sleeves in public, bruises from IVs and chemotherapy bare on my forearms. When the hospital comes for me, it means business.

I find myself back. Ten years back. Being driven to the ER, head swimming and warm, a worried and efficient driver insisting on treatment.

One’s body as a shared responsibility makes life chillingly inchoate,the potential of retreat can cause some head-scratching realizations, and a sort of restorative rest besides. Like that morning in 1998–my sister finally giving in and up on my assertions that I was just fine; making some calls, and dressing me, with scarf and gloves, wrapping me in a blanket, and nervously driving me, fevered, into the San Francisco Medical Center, hoping I’d be better by noon, but prepared somewhere beneath for the event that this would be our last morning together. Her, one hand on the wheel, one hand on my forehead, chatting and playing some Brian McKnight to lighten the mood, and me squinting and struggling to keep the heavy glass thermometer under my tongue while the car drifted forward.

That time it was voluntary coma and Epstein Barr virus. I slept through my 25th birthday and when I woke, my life had become simply something to be participated in, along with everyone else, a little game board to monitor; there was no taking anything in hand, or making any decisions, even on the most minor of details, just a series of tired negotiations to be had between naps.Nice, you know, to give in after months of tending and struggle, and to hand the body over, to share the trouble of it, its needs parceled out to a group. Perspective changes after submitting for awhile. The being fussed about. And when one comes out of it, one’s condition being super-recoverable, one gains patience and humility.

I consider my walking away from a solitary life–my world created with Patricia–a prolonged version of wrapping up a so-loved sister in a blanket and signing her into the best judgment of strangers.

And I am back. The interns and residents, the specialists from three fields, the adjustable bed, the phlebotomist, and the chemotherapy drip. Except now, ten years past, my heartline on the monitor flips upside down. It begins good enough–green, rhythmic peaks, but then it is interrupted by dips below the flatline. And every dip below the flatline brings up the resting heart rate and it is as if the machine has learned to register my quiet terror.