Bathtub gin

"The fact that I am writing the scenes means I survived them, and that fact alone brings comfort." 

--T Kira Madden 





My writing is percussive.

Yesterday I walked for the first time in five weeks. I took maybe 20 steps in the physical therapy clinic, probably less, and I wobbled the whole time. I held my arms out at my sides for balance and I focused all of my might and I walked.

I am not done with the crutches; or rather, they are not done with me. But this morning I woke up and after brushing my teeth in the bathroom I stood in the entrance to the main room, handed over my crutch, and walked all by myself the five feet to the couch. This is something.


The large man on the collapsible camp chair tried to mask his shock as the 29-year-old blond man sat on the lap of the 29-year-old brunette man and asked him if he could rub sunscreen into his back.

I ask him if he is a local and tell him I've just adopted a dog from his town.


She runs alongside me as I crutch through the cemetery. I am not supposed to be crutching this far, least of all alone. But she has laid so steadfastly by my side as I have prostrated myself and willed my body to heal, and she is bored, and I do not want her to think she has been adopted into a cage. And so I let her run off leash around me, and whenever she charges more than 50 feet or so ahead she turns of her own accord and waits until I have propelled myself to her side. The only time she leaves me is when another dog appears on the path above her. She charges up to greet him before she remembers that the voice calling her back is saying her name, that she has a name, that the voice is mine, and that she is beholden to me. She sprints back to my side and grabs a stick, flinging it into the air.


 I have eaten too many grapes and my belly hurts.



I have been manhandled in the security lines. While one woman screamed the other grabbed the pack on my back and yanked, and here I am on crutches nearly toppling backwards. By the time they are through with me I have tears streaming down my face. As I exit the station a kind man named Russell asks if I am okay.


I don't think I have cried in public like that since I was 11 years old and furious with my parents during an outing at the Wisehaven pool. That time I sobered up quickly and switched from tearful to unbelievably pissed, stalking the pool grounds for all purposes looking like a cherubic sociopath. This time it took me a little longer, because I was taken by waves of flashbacks for the rest of the evening, and there is not much I know how to do with those except sit them out and try to remind myself that here and now I am doing okay. Now these eight days later the anger is here and I will fight for the people who cannot walk, and who are treated less than for being that way.



Honestly if you do not know how to be kind then you are probably wasting my everyone's time.


Because I have not been able to walk I have been watching hours and hours of American Ninja Warrior. I imagine my body along with theirs, willing it to remember what it's like to leap, twist, grab... hold on. Willing it to be ready when I am capable of moving again.


I vacillate between acceptance and not wanting to be here. Never resentment of it having happened, never why me. Just frustration with watching my quad return to fleshiness, my calf withering away inside the brace. Just the dread of knowing what's to come. He instructs me to press backward and my whole leg shakes.



I chew on gluten-free flax crackers and drink Stevia-sweetened, no-sugar ginger ale to settle my stomach. Tomorrow I will drive myself to the pool alone, the first time since the injury, and I will clasp my legs around the buoy and swim with just my arms for 40 minutes without stopping.



Wilson is reclaiming his cuddle time. He crawls atop my chest, and when Hanna tries to crowd her way in he reaches out a paw and baps her right across the face.


Already in the mornings he is putting on a sweater before stepping outside.

I have written something that matters to me.