Quiescence

I have never felt like a broken person. I have never felt that because I was only 4/5 the human of any normal person that I was less whole. With an encompassing heart, and goals and fears, I lived life entirely, but perhaps just more quietly. In the medium in which I was both here and not here, shadows moved over me and a trickling warmness had coursed through my body. It had not scared me, all the doctors, because I knew they were people too, and they had hearts that longed to reach goals and battle fears. I breathed, and the world breathed with me. I relished the idea of a million tomorrows, and the world spun to simultaneously grant everyone their own tomorrows.

Surgery ended at two in the morning, and I was still here and not here, I was still deaf, and I still had goals and fears. I still had Laci, I presumed, waiting in the lobby with my parents and maybe even Druce. I felt alarmingly whole, until I had come to cross the barrier of here and not here too far, and realized I was permanently broken, for there was nothing but a piece of cloth where my left leg should have been. And just like that, I went back to not being here.