When I swore I’d never write about this, I guess I lied.
The part of it that none of you will ever understand, that I can never explain, is how much it hurt. The absolute bloocurdling, mindsplitting, unfathomable pain of my guts spilling out into my body cavity and my spine all but snapped in half and still somehow I’m struggling to get on my feet, I’m smiling, I’m politely asking to be allowed to just go to sleep, just for one minute, and I’m fading fast and my blood pressure’s dropped to almost zero and I cannot wrap my head around how much it hurts. I think I’m going to go mad, I think I’m going to split in two. The human nervous system is not equipped to process this sort of pain. And yet there I was, coherent and reasonable and asking softly if please they could just let me close my eyes, if please they could just put me under. And they’re begging me, pleading with me to stay awake, because if I close my eyes I might never wake up and I think at some point my mind just snapped. I don’t think I really came back to my senses for months after that. I don’t know if I ever really came all the way back at all. Apparently I was moments away from dying. I was bleeding to death. I somehow stayed awake until the operating table where they cut my skirt off even though they’d already cleaned the surgical area, presumably for dramatic effect. And there on the operating table, on my deathbed, I was yelling at them about ruining my good black skirt and then I begged them again to put me under and this time they did and I woke up sore and disoriented in a dull morphine haze in a hospital bed, still not really getting it. I asked if I could go back to school the next day. Two months and most of a vital organ later, I would emerge from my Chrysalis a torn and jaded moth and all I could think about was at least I would be thin now because that’s the sort of fucked up thing a teenage girl thinks of at times like that. Like I’d won some sort of liposuction lottery or something. But jesus holy fuck I could never even begin to explain how much it hurt. I myself can’t fathom it. It just fucking hurt so bad. It isn’t the nearly dying or the isolation or the uncertainty of the thing that got to me. I’ve known a number of people who’ve faced death or been sick or been traumatized. But I’ve never known another soul who could understand how much it hurt. It just fucking hurt so badly. I hope I’ve described it inadequately because I wouldn’t wish that kind of suffering on anyone, even a pale ghost of it. But I’ve never committed it to print until now and I wonder if it’ll somehow help me to do so. They always say write what you know and maybe this is what I know better than anything. So there it is. It hurt. It just fucking hurt. It hurt so bad. I can’t begin to tell you how much it hurt…wow, that feels better somehow.
So, um, have a nice day?
Sorry about all that.
Lalalalala…
I don’t know where that came from. I’m not even having a particularly bad day or anything. It just worked itself up out of some long buried scar tissue and – there it is. Funny how the human mind works. I don’t think I ever even really remembered what it exactly felt like until just now. I mean obviously I had some idea it had been unfathomably painful, but I hadn’t quite remembered the details of it in quite so intricate a matter.Kind of surprised at myself, actually.