is no one else grappling with meaning in this wasted place?
somehow i've lost the significant-filter in my eyes. everything i look at turns to dust, senseless, on the wind.
does no one else see a wasteland, arid and empty?
there aren't even any camels.

in our ardent, and often unconscious, search for truth and meaning in our lives here on earth, we repeatedly stumble across, and up against, something we refer to as 'love'. this is where we, as a species, have not yet bravely taken the next evolutionary leap of faith. perhaps this is where we will become known to the rest of the glowing space atoms as 'the beings who didn't make it'; perhaps this is where our passing will be marked, where murky old cosmic slides will portray our quizzical little inventions to a perplexed audience of light beings in a dark room. perhaps this is where we become dusty history volumes in a silent library.

in a baffling array of our rejections of love (a rather vast umbrella term encompassing so much more than what the media tells us "love" is), we are quickly rushing into an existence without meaning.
there are those of us searching for what we've somehow collectively lost along the way, trailing around with our feet in the sky and our head on the ground looking for trampled breadcrumbs and simplicity.
there are those of us who are lost, and completely caught up in an insular existence in which they believe they have found truth and meaning.
what we are grasping at, like a sleep numbed hand in the dark clawing for the light switch, is an understanding of love.
we are searching for love.
since you cannot find in another's eyes the light you do not have yourself, to love yourself, you must become love. and this is where we find ourselves, at the brink of some shameless moment, reaching for a secret fire, a blinding light.
this is where we stumble.
a gentle descent creases our greatness with the cost of goodness.
how does one (truly) love part of the terrible machine it has become?

they tell me there is a crack in everything, and that is where the light comes in.
i struggle desperately with this challenge, and wonder at mankind's desolate lack of love.

we fought against everything when we were young. we rejected the preconceived notions that authority figures and media tried to spoon-feed us. we refused to accept stereotypes and social constraints and meaningless, hollow small talk. we rejected the typical nuclear family ideal, the breadwinning man, the bread-baking woman. we said no to resource exploitation and rampant global warming and mindless consumerism. we championed women's rights and racial equality, we built schools in poor countries, we rode bicycles.
we believed in freedom.
the thing about us now is that we WANT what they're selling. we want those cars, those clothes, that house, those kids. we want that paradigm, regardless of how many lies it comes with. we want security and peace of mind and comfort and, hell, if they're on the market, why not buy them?
now, we have business degrees and children. we are nuclear families. we are men, or women, and there is no grey area about our sexuality. we are womanizers and we are disconnected and we live in cities with jobs we don't particularly like. we aren't sure how it happened, or even that it really did. the change was gradual; a creeping defeat. we are silent, now. we are accepting. this is the revolution, grown up and washed out.
we used to believe in freedom.
not all of us have always wanted these things in this way. we were young and pleasantly angry most of the time, we were hashing out morals and values that dared to look outside the preconceived cookie-cutter molds we'd been handed the day we were born. we cared about the planet, about the people on it, about the things we did, and ate, and created. we cared about HOW things happened, or were produced, shipped, manufactured, sold. we cared about WHY things happened. we cared about smashing presuppositions and laughed at stereotypes and stagnant paradigms. we cared about equality and rights and health and peace.
we believed in freedom.
and in the blink of an eye, in less years than there are fingers on a hand, we went up in smoke. we stepped across the line without even realizing it. a slow, creeping lure. a subversive defeat. where have we all gone? we are not who we think we are. we have compromised and compromised and compromised. we have compromised, and we are no longer sane.
we've given up asking questions and cemented our favorite assumptions. we are solidly, unfortunately, amazingly ignorant. stagnant. oblivious. we are like statues, graven images of the life we used to be, and there is little room for anything else. there is little room for lives less holy, for people with their eyes open. we are lulled softly back to sleep, by the rocking of a city bus, by the blinking of neon lights, by a duvet of alcohol thrown over our prone and drooling brains.
i'm 21 years old and i feel like it's already too late to live.
we have forgotten about freedom.

there is nothing of interest here.

dear self.
must resolve to reconsider the merits of more thoroughly planning ahead. perhaps structure and commitment aren't so detrimental after all.
would most likely benefit from increased socialization. or at least learning to carry a conversation. social conventions (however unfortunately) do have a place.
also, do not lose wallet again while fighting drunk in the snow for shotgun. just don't.
and get a haircut.
yours truly.

instead of doing anything productive, such as, perhaps, physiotherapy or school work, i keep reading all these articles and watching all these documentaries on evolution and the origins of life on earth. somewhat obsessively, i won't lie. i don't know why; i just can't stop. i'm morbidly fascinated with the pertinence of all this evidence to our future, collectively. i guess we just seem so doomed to failure, to destruction and extinction through our general ignorance, that i can't tear my mind away from it. like if i blink i might miss it; the burst of light marking the disappearance of life on Earth. such a trivial and insignificant explosion, i guess, given the scope of everything around us. but it's unsettling to think that we could just flicker out like that, and be gone forever. it's disconcerting to think that we won't have been intelligent enough to save ourselves from our own unenlightenment, our own rampant idiocy. it's sort of like watching a race car hurtle towards a brick wall at mach speed while the driver swigs at a gin bottle and drags on a cigarette with his unbuckled seatbelt flapping out the window. how can you tear your eyes away?

sometimes i feel like it's already happened. and it may as well have. if the evolutionary time scale of the earth were to be measured out on a piano's keys, the length of time humans have been around would only be the width of one piano STRING. so i stand in the middle of a throbbing, speeding city, listening to the cars and walk signals and aching traffic lights, watching life whip by as fast as it possibly can, and sometimes everything around me just disappears. i blink and all the buildings are gone, the vehicles and the billboards and the streams of droid-like people, gone. a jagged, brown landscape is left; nothing green grows. a warm breeze nudges papers about the ruins, and there is complete, ear-shattering silence. sometimes i blink and i am left in the chaos alone, wondering.. what next?

the other night i had one of those 'end-of-the-world' dreams. it started from the point of view of some large and omniscient sort of being watching the movement of planets and stars, and sort of waving a hand about to guide their happenings. they were dark against a darker background, with these slender, delicate, multicolored strings of light swirling around them. they were beautiful, just orbiting about, reacting to the forces around them, but then i whispered "supernova" with an outstretched hand and one of the stars exploded into millions of brightly colored strings that slowly wound their way around the other planets and stars in the vicinity. it was pretty sweet. except then it switched to me, the human being, down on earth, and it was turning into some sort of ice age and people were losing their shit and looting and pillaging and dying and i couldn't find anyone i knew, i was alone and struck by the pointlessness of struggling to continue. we were all just silly animals again, and without very many skills for survival in a world without concrete and online shopping, without any real understanding of the carefully balanced struggle that every other species is born into.

anyway, now my brain is stuck in 'millenia' time mode, and it's as if everything around me turns to dust as i see it, it's that transparently brief. 
i'm having a hard time with this 'be-a-normal-person' thing. pretty sure i have an inherent 'freak' gene hardwired into my dna.

well, it's winter now. no more denial, it's pitch black by 4:30 pm. of course, the first official day of winter isn't until december 21st, which is utter malarkey if you live above the 53rd parallel. most of us had snowmen in our front yards a month ago, and wool socks on heavy rotation another month before that. but despite the unforgiving seal of fate committing the next 6 months of our lives to a time of ice and darkness and barren wasteland (you'd almost think there'd be dragons involved, too), things are looking up. my body, the tremendous aching miracle, is on the verge of being normal again.
ok. that's sort of a lie. but only sort of. i still can't spend all day upright, but i can climb or hike or shovel paths through 8 feet of snow. and jump! i can jump. jesus, i thought i would never jump again. i have never been so happy to bounce up and down. like an idiot. so, you know, normal people things. the main thing here is that i can generally convince myself that i'm a normal, healthy person again, and not a 75 year old woman with arthritis and metal hips and some mysterious bone disease. these little lies propel me forwards with an oblivious sort of vigor. kind of like if i pretend is isn't happening, then it really isn't happening. so far, sprinklings of denial here and there have been serving me rather well.
twice a week i go to physio, which follows the same sort of pattern:
first, i somehow manage to create an unnecessarily convoluted problem for the receptionists, who i am almost certain hate me by now.
second, i sit in a waiting room chair and another patient stares uncomfortably at my perfectly erect posture, like i were balancing an invisible apple on my head.
third, the physiotherapist and i do physiotherapy things while i pester her with the same two questions:
"so, can i snowboard yet?"
"well then, can i treeplant this summer? ... why are you laughing? ... why do you always laugh when i ask that?"
the reaction has so far been mostly the same; an uncomfortable laugh, and then a stare that seems to say, "oh.. you're serious? shit. what's the most tactful way to answer this?"
and so, while i can no longer deny the descended ice age that is a canadian winter, i am still fervently ignoring any sort of future implications these broken vertebrae may hold. and will continue to do so until it's midsummer and i suddenly realize that i'm not slamming seedlings into rocky ground for shitty prices in the pouring rain surrounded by bloodthirsty bugs the size of fruit bats. at which point i'll just tell myself that i never wanted to do that again anyways.
seriously. what kind of person wants that?

i can't help a certain startled feeling when studying the origins of life on earth (or what we think we know of it, anyways). the more information i unearth about the past, the more the future takes on a variety of surprising possibilities. but no matter which possibility it takes, it is the distinct and sharp form our future begins to hold that unsettles me; as if we were slowly unearthing the pieces of a prehistoric puzzle and piecing them together. the picture is one of us, where and who and why we are, and of our projected future. it grows clearer with each trilobite fossil we delicately wrest from the earth's clutches, yet we seem like a bunch of chimpanzees crowded around a video game featuring apes: scratching our heads with a vague feeling of significance niggling at our throats, but too simple to understand what to do next.

take the cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago. although somewhat debated, scientific evidence thus far proves it a valid theory. up to this point, life had pretty much been simple, single celled organisms occasionally organized into colonies. then, suddenly, the earth saw a rapid explosion in the evolution of most of the major groups of complex animals. life on earth promptly progressed at a breakneck speed. it was as if some sea god has stepped up to a podium somewhere, cleared his throat at the assembled crowd, and offered an unbelievable prize for the species most evolved in the next couple hundred thousand years. organisms paused, looked incredulously at one another, and then immediately raced away to begin their fervent work on evolving. there are many posited causes of this explosion, ranging from environmental (increase in earth's oxygen levels) to ecological (changes in the food chain, development of eyes, arms race between predators, coevolution). but the most spectacular development out of this whole thing, to me, at any rate, is the evolution of eyes. in a potentially short period of time, organisms somehow shot from basic photoreceptor proteins grouped together in "eyespots" that were simply able to detect the presence of light, to fully developed eyes, as we know them today, that can distinguish shapes, colors, direction, speed, and dimension/distance.

suddenly, we could see. well, not quite so suddenly, but suddenly on an evolutionary timescale, anyways. imagine, being some little sea creature, something like a planarium maybe, cruising around doing your thing, when you're abruptly struck with eyeballs and vision. BAM. CHECK IT OUT, DUDE. everything you know about the world around you just changed. in fact, everything you KNOW just changed. there's an entire dimension out there that you had no clue about, because you didn't have the capability of perceiving it.

so as the amusing chain of evolution continues, we find ourselves slowly developing more capabilities throughout the millennia. somewhere, some aquatic creature takes the first tentative steps onto terra firma, and WHAM. we discover a whole new world. as our capacity increases, it seems, so does our environment. or our AWARENESS of our environment, at least.

so, at the risk of sounding moronically cliche.. what else is out there? what else are we living amongst right now that we have no way of perceiving? when are we going to develop our new "eyes", the senses that we currently lack? i don't know why, but this consumes me. it makes it difficult to live in the present when you're constantly wondering about the past and the future. not knowing kills me; i was the brat always demanding an answer, "but why?" it also makes me think that we're completely ridiculous for thinking that we're so fucking COOL. you know? people think that we're just awesome, that we're these amazingly intelligent creatures capable of creating and discovering the DARNDEST things. computers and internal combustion engines and atomic bombs and ipods. gosh. how smart are WE?

well, we're not, really. in many senses, we're no further along that those simple, single celled organisms were over 600 million years ago. what is life going to look like 600 million years from now? i feel that whatever shape it takes, we will most certainly pale in comparison. and at any rate, how many of us actually DO invent internal combustion engines on a daily basis? most of us are overweight and spend our time shopping at wal-mart in nauseatingly scanty spandex outfits. most of us are not very cool at all. click here to see what i mean.

makes you think twice about eugenics, doesn't it?

a three million year old skeleton
crawled out of the ground
crawled out of the ground
to stare
into our slowly blinking eyes
and speak of our insignificance
our infinitesimal, imperceptible existence
our glorious incomprehension, stretching the days long
steeping our evolution
in a desperate sort
of meaning.



"meaning?" she shrugged, pushing her glasses back up her nose with an unconscious, familiar gesture. "we're stewards; we're organizers and caretakers. the highest form of fulfillment is simply bearing witness to the world around us; from this, all things spawn. all change, all adaptation, all revision. whether or not we will, at some point, progress towards a new aim, a modified purpose, is beyond our interpretation. we are here, we are now, and we are brief. we keep searching for some intrinsic truth when it's right before us; all around us, really, and we're deeply integrated into it. one of humankind's most popular religious texts begins with the story of a man and woman presented to a paradise with the task of giving name to everything around them; i.e. bearing witness. we are here to realize this, to accept and embrace the challenge."
"you're going to base our ultimate meaning on a bible story? our higher purpose is to play out adam and eve for the rest of our days?"
"you have a more applicable belief?"
"..quite a few."
she shrugged again, more with the expression on her face than with the movement of her shoulders this time. a crow flew overhead, high in the cold, murky clouds. her eyes inadvertently followed its flight as she spoke: "maybe meaning is subjective; dependent on our minds or our perceptions for existence. maybe i'm just here to watch the birds fly around eating soggy worms off the cement after it rains. maybe you are not." suddenly, she seemed tangibly more present; sharper, brighter, as if parts of her had been elsewhere and had abruptly returned home to unite their attentions. peering at me through her lenses as though they were a porthole window in a submarine, and i some undiscovered form of life at the bottom of the sea, she asked, "what ARE you here for, then?" as though expecting an answer. as though that wasn't what i'd been trying to wrest from her.
"uh. that's sort of what i've been asking you."
"oh. well." again, her shoulders wandered skyward. "sometimes you just need to stop looking so hard to see what's right in front of you. if there's anything we're good at, it's complicating absurdly simple things." her form softened again, her eyes roamed skyward. i envied her integration, her sense of placement, the power of her embracement.

it started, as so many seemingly simple situations often do, with a barely discernible warmth in my chest; the change in the temperature of the skyline as the sun creeps towards it from the dark underbelly of the world. i was oblivious, of course, like a sleeping child curled beneath crumpled sheets, and dreaming of fantastical beings and places never been. the growing heat stole towards the horizon; my chest grew warmer as it rose, and spread, and permeated my unmindful being. dancing at my throat and flickering softly down into my arms, it swelled and flourished. i blinked; smiled; bent to study something interesting in the grass. it started with a blurred and misty warmth deep below my heart which easily convinced me of its innocence and simplicity.
slowly, it rose, so that the changes were almost imperceptible. so that i was only faintly aware of this smoldering catalyst beginning to reach its rays right to the top ridge of my heart; so that i was accustomed to its dormant strength, and suspected nothing from this warmth that had grown with me through the days. it started as a minute shift in the black of the skyline, as a softening in the hard texture where mountain tops meet sky. and by the time i suddenly thought to pause to recalibrate, my reevaluation revealed a force with spirit that i didn't understand, and strength i wasn't sure i was comfortable with. i felt roots extending, anchoring, steadying; implications swirling. by the time it hit me, mid-step and frozen, lips parted with a whisper of a curse, the momentum was unstoppable. which, perhaps it had been right from the start anyways, although now it was not only inexorable, but projectable too. a cursory glance at it's trajectory coupled with its exponentially expanding velocity equaled an explosion of mammoth proportions within the next few years of my life; an unbearable warmth; a burst of light to end all nights.
it started as a gentle shift; a tentative birdsong lifting the dark grey on the horizon to reveal something softer beneath. it started with a sleepy sigh as i began turning in my half-sleep before the dawn; a lung-full of evaporating mist, and the smell of trees warming to the day. i was unaware of this. unaware of the coming dawn, unaware of my state of sleep, and eventually, unaware that sheer ignorance couldn't prevent the warmth from rising. i want to say, too, that i was unaware of the exquisite serenity that might accompany surrender to this primal force. part of me wants to leap ahead and say that, but i still don't know; i'm still trying to swallow the impulse back down into the depth from whence it came.
it started like any day starts, which means that it always was, for a day doesn't really have a specific starting point, just a darker form that we know as night and a million shades between. so it started at the dawn of time then, which, too, means that it always was, for although we cling desperately to the idea that time is a flat and linear event, perhaps it is just our thought process that behaves this way. perhaps time is actually nonlinear, an eternal mobius strip with no beginning or end. so it started with a simple recognition, then, an acknowledgment of what already was, and was growing at that. it began with a realization of warmth, dormant yet readying to rise. and as if my notice were all the permission needed, all the fuel required, the warmth awoke, stretched slowly, and rose. and as it did, i did too. the sleeping child opened her eyes to a morning unlike any other, to the prospect of many more mornings to come, to the potential life that might experience them, and to the love of that life, as yet unmanifested, and the desire to create it, nurture it, and revel in it. the dawning that had begun with a gentle warmth illuminated and stirred to action an intrinsic and basic force of nature that i, in all of my glorious humanity, was hard-pressed to suppress. the more i thought about it, the more it began to appeal to my fundamental nature. it was instinctual, to embrace the warmth, and the more i scratched thoughtfully at it, the more the itch grew.
i am left uncertain, asking myself whether i lose something of value by ignoring this dawn, pondering the evolutionary processes that have lead to a society which affords us the opportunity to do so in the first place, and considering the significance of this choice that is mine through a random mixture of DNA about 21 years ago. a choice i would not have if someone else had said no to theirs.
hmm.

1.) gee, thanks for sharing, but i've heard enough car accident stories to last me 10 lifetimes, buddy.
2.) of course i wasn't wearing a seatbelt, smart ass. how else do you break 10 vertebrae?
3.) mhmm.. well, not as lucky as you.
4.) yes! yes you can see my ultra-awesome scars.

from the cliffs, our town looks sleepy and lazy
and on this rocky ledge i'm doing nothing more than reclining
breathing slowly and blinking
twisted a little, seeking the softest, darkest bits of earth
a root the weather has exposed.
below, the shadows grow long
the earth's windswept hair fading to the east
dripping from alpine-peaked roof tops
mountain ranges in miniature
grid-like and shingled
human mimicry of the essence we call god.
shifting, fingers working among dropped pine needles
my lateral roots dig deeper.
if i wait here
lengthening and spreading with the evening shadows
leaning over trails in the underbrush
if i stay here
impervious to the wistful call of wood smoke
and electric lighting
if i fall asleep here
looking down on the flight of birds
will you tell me more about silence
and truth
and the other things our lazy towns ignore?

our names
are glorious little excuses;
i think that we all
want to be obligated to care about someone
somewhere inside of our distant and increasingly hollow hearts
and family
is our excuse to start.

uncertain rustlings in the wind, your words leaped about the room, displacing shadows; your hands turning over some object, i knew, your eyes averted. the telephone grew heavy against my hand, like something unsaid was stuck in there, all those weighted, brittle words half-formed by thought. i shook it and listened: only your vacant voice vaguely crackling allusions, suggestions, something just short of truth. i listened as you struggled, wings against a storm. what tempest so tore at you, i wondered, as starkly, your unease whirled through the phone lines and whipped itself against the livingroom windows: desolate, proud, stunned. and as you spoke i began to realize that the plate glass window you threw yourself against was your own ineffable mortality, that the confrontation grew darker and heavier for you than i, young, unsplintered and undiminished, could know. the unsaid pressure grew inside the telephone, and around my head the air shook, wavered, a haze of waving qualms. the sound of thinly concealed fear in your voice, however slight, struck as a savage blow. i was left reeling in disbelief, hesitant, tentative. something vicious and cold circled my heart as it stumbled, caught off guard.
uncertain rustlings in the wind, my heartbeat leaped about the room; my hands cold, my eyes shaking, searching for something solid to steady themselves against. slowly, i gathered the feathers left by your unease when it smashed into the glass. outside, i clutched them in a white-knuckled hand against my face. a breeze pulled at my sweater, flew my hair. i took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and blew. the autumn day was crisp and full of smoke and crackling leaves. i listened for the mountains in the distance, and braced myself as they brought uncertain rustlings on the wind.

i swear to you, i heard the earth inhale / a darkened, stumbling day / an absence of time.

our forms distorted, cleaving the summer heat / glass shards like birds / vehement momentum.

truth unsung, a song in the grass / the weight of our screams / like arrogance, like ignorance.

who are we to feel the breath of the world / hot against the skin on our necks / calling us by name?

once upon a time i became bionic.
no, no. not in an x-men sort of way. they didn't fuse adamantium with my skeleton (although, given the circumstances, you'd think they'd consider making that a viable option). let me explain.
on a thick and warm midsummer's day, lianne and i pulled our last seedlings from our bags and slammed them decisively into the ground, somewhere on a cutblock about 120 kilometers out of Horsefly, BC. the planting season was over, and we were free. after a solid night of mayhem to mark the occasion, we awoke the next morning on july 17th, crammed all of our material shit into lianne's new van, avoided as many tearful goodbyes as possible, and set sail for the rest of our lives.
we were destined for vancouver. the day was hot, long, and blissful. i remember that even the air rushing over my feet, which were propped up hanging out the passenger window, was warm. i kept suggesting we stop, once we hit the canyon, and go swimming in the clear, green river, but stopping meant that the heat caught up to you. it was at least 40 degrees, and air conditioning wasn't particularly an option. we did stop for ice cream in cache creek though; i remember a man outside with his dog, sitting in a patch of shade, waiting. whatever i got was sickly sweet and i didn't finish it.
we drew closer and closer to the city of vancouver. i could nearly taste the smog in the back of my throat as we wound down through the canyon, following the Fraser River to the sea. then, at about 3 or 4pm, just north of Lytton, we approached a T intersection marked by a stop sign for anyone turning onto the highway. a woman in a car approached this stop sign at the same time, deemed it an unnecessary triviality, and blew it. she pulled straight in front of our van, and froze. in a disgustingly slow-motion chain of reactionary events, lianne swerved to avoid hitting her, lost control, and plunged over the side of the cliff to the right. i remember gripping uselessly at the armrests as the vehicle pitched downwards; why hadn't i put my seatbelt on? all i could see was the bright green of the river through the windshield. fuck, i thought. fuck, we're going to end up in that river.
"fear" does not even begin to describe what i felt as i heard the tires screeching across the hot pavement as we lost control. "panic" does no justice whatsoever to describe the disbelief and terror that gripped every inch of my soul when the van flew off the edge of the highway at 90km/h. something BAD was going to happen, i knew. were we screaming? i can't remember if we were even making any noise at this point. the van rolled and rolled and rolled, and i was thrown out of a smashed window somewhere along the line. i don't remember it; my mind's conveniently chosen to blank that bit out. lianne went down with the van over the next embankment, but stopped before the river. i must have been conscious, lying smeared across the ground when they found me, but i have only the vaguest recollection of people leaning over me and asking millions of questions that i didn't have any answers to. who are you? what happened? where does it hurt? what is your phone number? i remember mumbling, "i don't know," over and over, giving a 4 year old phone number for some reason, while desperately trying to block out the pain. one of the men who was there said in his statement that i was very coherent and fairly calm the entire time. what i really remember was waking up with paramedics over top of me. the sky was growing dark. they stabilized my neck and rolled me onto a spine board. i screamed and made unearthly, guttural groaning pleas for them to stop moving me. they put me in an ambulance and an attendant crawled in after me, shutting the door behind her. i remember a distinct feeling of safety before losing consciousness.
in the hospital, they tried to cut off my clothes. i swore at them and demanded to take them off intact. "sarah.. you've broken your back," they said.
"so what, these are my favorite shorts. don't cut them. DON'T CUT MY FAVORITE FUCKING SHORTS! i can take them off myself. did you cut them? you cut them!"
"no, no. it's ok, they're fine, see?"
i ran my hand over a huge slash in the right short leg.
"see?" said the nurses. "they're fine."
"ahh yes, you're right," i agreed. brains act strange when you bang them up. i tried to lift my butt to slide my shorts down, but i couldn't.
"what that.. what the hell's the matter with..."
"your back is broken, sweetie. calm down, let me help."
"don't cut my favorite shorts!"
"myrna, put those damn scissors away before she gets any more agitated."
with my shirt off, i discovered a decent gash in my right shoulder with my innards stumbling out. i poked at a soft, white something, trying to make it go back inside my arm where it belonged. "woah.. is that fat? or muscle? what is that? look, check it out!"
"here now, don't touch that. we're going to sew it up right away. good girl." the pain of the stitching needle was gentle and distant as the nurses patronization. when the neurosurgeon finally came to see me, he told me that i'd smashed my neck and back. my eyes teared up, and i remember wiggling my toes thinking, oh my god, i can still move my toes. i couldn't lift my legs. "will... will i ever.. ever treeplant again?" i sobbed up at him. he laughed and laughed, and assured me that i would. was he serious, or just placating me? i was wheeled into surgery soon after, and remember passing out as i choked on a tube someone was struggling to get down my throat.
i spent two weeks in the hospital re-learning to eat solid food and sit up. i was stoned out of my mind of morphine, demerol, adavan, percocet, gabapenton, valium, and oxycontin nearly the entire time, and i could still feel the pain. i woke up screaming whenever the doses faded. i remember that even just pushing the button to activate another dose of demerol from the pump was an effort that made me whimper in pain. there were three states at this point: dead to the world, stoned and apparently sleeping yet keenly aware of anything happening around me, or awake screaming as the morphine ran out. the nurses cleaned my raw, cement-eaten limbs, and i screamed some more. i vaguely remember paging through a People magazine with lianne before she left, deciding which dresses we would and wouldn't wear. which is to say, lianne paged through it over top of my supine and drugged form, while i struggled to stay awake. i've never been so stoned in my life. i remember reaching over to touch the cast on her arm at one point, and realizing that she'd shattered her upper arm. my family and friends came to see me, and i was shocked to see that these people cared so much about me. being in the hospital left a bitter taste in my mouth, however; the system taught me quite thoroughly the meaning of being an invalid: you are in-valid.
now, three months, 10 broken vertebrae, a handful of broken ribs, a punctured lung, 2 titanium rods, 4 titanium screws, and a bunch of deadly scars later, i am bionic. and i'm not just talking about my reinforced spine and it's newfound capabilities (which is mainly just setting off metal detectors.. it does not, unfortunately, seem to be magnetic). i'm talking also about the reinforced HEAD you need to get through this kind of thing. spending three months in braces in bed wondering if you'll ever return to even an inkling of what you used to be is a pretty hard hit to take, especially as a virile, tenacious youth. you watch helplessly as your muscles atrophy and disappear. your body is unknown to you; everything hurts, nothing works the way it used to, and you have no idea if it ever will again. you have an equally difficult time imagining life without the chronic, crippling pain in your back. perhaps it will never go away. perhaps you will never treeplant again, never snowboard, never jump off of bridges into rivers in the summer time. maybe you will never return to the sort of life you led before, will never be able to spend time outdoors the way you used to. maybe those screws in your 4th and 8th thorasic vertebrae will always scream when you've been upright for more than a few hours. maybe, you think, this will haunt you for the rest of your life.
suddenly, somewhere a switch flips. maybe this WILL haunt you for the rest of your life, but damned if you're going to acknowledge it's victory.
i refuse to take no for an answer. i WILL treeplant again, and i WILL learn to forget about this.
which isn't to say that it isn't still difficult. some days it takes everything i have to keep the door closed on absolute despair. i'm suing one of my best friends for every possible form of "negligence which nearly caused my death", because no one can prove that that woman blew that stop sign. i live with constant, incapacitating pain. i'm still dependent on other people for alot of things, i'm back on narcotics to manage the pain, and i definitely don't have 7 lives left anymore.
but i am bionic. in more ways than just physically, i am bionic. they told me that my spine was now reinforced, but what i didn't know was just how strong the less tangible parts of me were to become. and are still becoming.
why, by the time this is all over, my mind will be tough enough to break bricks with. guaranteed.
and i hear chicks dig scars, don't they? i seriously need to develop some sort of terrible party trick involving the titanium in my spine. even if fridge magnets would just stick to it, you know? i'm positive that this would dramatically improve my recovery.