I want to disappear. Just for a while. Not answer e-mails, phone calls, text messages. I want to start feeling like myself again – lose 15 lbs, fit into dresses I could 6 months ago, look in the mirror and recognize past face and skin the ?woman? inside her own body.

How much do we have to practice being in our skin? Like anything else – cellos, trumpets, painting – the more we practice, the better we are and for as long as I’ve been in my body, why am I not an expert? Are we ever? I’m beginning to think not.

Soul and skin retract and slip like two continental plates running into each other. Things break off, new islands are created. I wonder how this most recent collision will change me? As the aftershock wears off – parts of me will stand and parts of me will fall. I’ll be remade from my own rubble.

But what do you do when something feels like a gangrene arm, do you cut it off or try to save it? Either way it will never be how it was – fluid, connected, mapped from freckle to freckle skin to skin. I pick up what I think is a hand, but the phantom limb takes over.


Comments

4 responses to “Amputee”

  1. Ah. Depends on how deep into the bone the infection really is. Sometimes you just have to cut it off.
    As to bodies- let me know when you figure this one out, okay?

    1. rachvb Avatar
      rachvb

      Time will tell, I think. There are a lot of things I’m hoping to leave here when I move. I’m making a burn pile. It’s getting pretty big.
      I’ll let you know if I make any headway on bodies. Every time I think I’ve discovered something, I change again. I know we shed skin a lot. That’s about the only constant. xo

  2. Practice does not always make perfect – at least not mine. Life. If letting go was an easy task, everyone would do it. Some days our (by now) multiple phantom limbs just up and dope slap us. We reel and recover. And yes, rebuild ourselves from our own, ongoing rubble. We become bionic. xo

    1. rachvb Avatar
      rachvb

      There is no perfect, I guess. Thinking about it, when is anything perfect?
      Dope slap is a very good way to put it! =) I wonder too if we have a bit of worm or iguana in us – things get cut off, we grow them back. Less rubble. In fact the rubble of worm becomes another worm. We must all have millions of pieces of ourselves out in the world. xo

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