self-portrait tuesday -- time

sometime this week marks the eighth year anniversary of "the accident." the accident involved a late dinner, a silly race over carpet, between tables, a plate glass door that didn't open with the trigger of the handle, smashing, crashing, screaming, puking, blood, ambulance, morphine, surgery, prescription drugs, rubber bands, blue plastic, dr. millon (ooh, la, la), shellye, therapy, tears, organist cookies, a new cellist, left-handed scrawling, excessive amounts of free time, and the surprise of fingers that still worked, strong hands, strong mind, strong heart.



everything i remember about the accident comes in patches, flashes, the colors swirling in saturated colors. the sounds are echoes, underwater, slow, the swish and gurgle of something unintelligible. time didn't stop, it flickered its no vacancy light as my world crashed down with the shards of glass.

quincy was there. shortly after i looked down and stretched my fingers long and open and saw the bone of my arm squinting in the light, shortly after i screamed like a girl and melanie threw up on the sidewalk, quincy sat on the "do not sit on the umbrella stands" stands that were better as benches. he sat there in his white shirt, his black hands holding my head so that i'd stop looking at my arm. i bled all over him and told him that i loved him. jamie came around with her big lips and i screamed at her and told her to get away from me. she was embarrassed and shirked back into the bushes. "don't cut my velvet jacket," i squawked. surreal, the things that seem important when you're not quite thinking straight. my brother dashed over and we rode away in the ambulance where he pretended that it was all cool, calm and collected as always, making the necessary phone calls, telling me i'd be okay.

it wasn't really okay. the tiny ER doc said i just needed stitches and then he looked and accidentally exclaimed, "things are falling out of here!" i was loopy, the room bright and strange. i didn't know my social security number, they had to call my dad. i could hear the man on the other side of the curtain trying to use someone else's number as his own.

i certainly don't remember surgery, only the sad expression of the doctor who said we'd talk about the piano, about music later, not to think about it too much right now. i remember having my hair washed by the nurse, having a friend slip into the hospital to hold my other hand and cry with me, rebekah calling from chicago, exclaiming how deeply this hurt her and how she didn't know how to feel or what to say as she screamed in my ear.

my dorm supervisor came and told me not to worry, that i wouldn't be getting demerits for any of this. "now we know not to run," she said smugly, her collar buttoned tight around her aging neck, her raincoat hanging smoothly over her arm. i was too tired to engage so i looked the other way until she left. surreal, the things that are more important than compassion to some people.

later, shellye took off the plaster and my arm was limp and like a shining white fish under the fluorescent light. the scar was long, stretching out, curling around, from my wrist nearly to my elbow. it was red and the skins were apologetically smooshed up against each other. my fingers wouldn't move, the tendons, nerves had been severed. "it was a clean cut -- it wasn't hard to see what went where," the doctor said cheerfully, mapping out the atlas of the insides of my hand, my wrist, feeling the thrill of his job, the rush of a job well done.

time passed. soon the nerves would zap at each other, electric life telling me where to feel, sometimes mistaken, the cuts not as clean as promised, the rewiring a bit off, turning on the kitchen light when i was flipping the hall switch. the fingers were weak and weary. it didn't look like the other hand as much as it used to. i spent the summer at the piano teaching the hand to play, to think like it used to think, teaching it to remember.

the scar was bright for a long time after that. shiny, purple in places. "did you try to kill yourself or something?" will asked bluntly, his sad eyes, pouting lips and weak chin looking the arm over.

this morning the scar is nearly nothing, a faint white line with new freckles in places . "i knew a woman would want her arm to be pretty -- i did what i could," the doc boasted of his stitching skills, a tailor working invisible stitchery with living, growing things. even to take a photograph the thing is barely there, the light of the sky, the flash, the ceiling bleaching it white as before.

eight years is nothing, just as the whip of the moment as my hand punched through the glass is nothing, the hollow crack as the door spat me onto the sidewalk, the punctuated seconds of realization before the screaming began, is really nothing at all. the blank stare of the scar tells me that the magnitude of the moment disappears with time, it becomes silver and forgetful with a wink and a sleep.