desired tenderness #10
on being crushed, hanging on and 5 weeks from now
About a year and a half ago, I dropped an extremely heavy lamp on my big toe, essentially crushing and grinding the bones as if I were following a giant’s favorite bread recipe. This began a long relationship with what I bitterly referred to as my Goblin Toe.
While anyone with the gift of vision could tell the toe nail was beyond redemption by the fact it looked like I had daintily tried the temperature of a pool filled with aubergine house paint and motor oil, I foolishly remained in nail denial. In my mind it was simply a matter of grafting the damaged nail to the undamaged nail, much like you would improve fruit production of a tree. My attitude was not unlike the cliche portrayals of TV people unable to take a loved one off life support. Gently tending to it daily I thought we’d show them all, all those non-believers, what fools they’d been when my new experimental toenail grafting technology proved highly effective. Eventually the Goblin Toe’s traumatized nail did flatline on me, and was immediately reincarnated as a tiny baby nail closely resembling a talon.
Much to my surprise and no one else’s, over time the Goblin Toe has improved to the state of almost like that of a human toe. Then a little over a month ago a small irksome spot on the bottom of my foot caused me to go to the dermatologist who gave me another foot jail sentence. A planter’s wart. Which is also a form of HPV, which I am just going to say it, is the most unadventurous way to get HPV. Just the phrase planter’s wart makes me feel like I am partially made of putrid bog witch. My dermatologist says it normally takes at least 5 sessions to destroy a wart but that some warts are treatment resistant, or impossible to get rid of and will just go away sometime in the next 7 years. I remark that “Well the first four will probably be the worst, but at this point all I can hope for is that I ever get to vote again, planters warts or not”. For a second I remember, oh right, not everyone thinks we are rapidly sliding into a fascist state. I am relieved when she responds “yeah, no kidding”. She brings out the dry ice and begins blasting my Witch Foot right below my Goblin Toe with blistering cold air. We make an appointment 5 weeks from now to do another treatment, but we both agree to make the caveat of that appointment being “if any of this matters”.
Life is weird like that. It’s sort of fucked up that healing is never linear, but time always is. The mismatched nature of this feels subtly like the universe showed up wearing navy socks and black shoes. I can’t quite tell if it is from inattention or some coy subversion. Five weeks later, I guess it still matters. We are still here, the wart is still here, and we will just keep trying. Maybe nothing will work. But the still-human parts of me want to try.
I recently went out to get a yellow onion I forgot at the store, and in doing so, also forgot I needed a lemon. My partner Zack, who smells suspiciously more like Tide detergent than roses for someone who I have confirmed is an actual saint, offered to venture out for the forgotten lemon. Osmogenesia aside, this is very typical of Zack’s generous and patient nature and I have learned over time to accept these favors.
It seemed to me to be taking a long time, and I start to think oh god, what if something happened to Saint Zack. Well firstly, I’d never be able to enjoy lemons again. I would have to change the poorly written collection of essays about my life to be “Life Gives You Lemons’ wouldn’t I? With a potential sequel teasing a more optimistic future, “Finding Zest Again”? But then people will think I was just constantly sending Zack out to get lemons all the time, just hoping, just absolutely praying, that something bad would happen because then I’d have a zippy title. This is the problem I seem to be having with writing as of late. I am on divergent timelines of trying to live, write and edit the moment.
Zack walks into the apartment happily singing I have the lemons and I am so worried that I am going to lose this momentary self awareness that I am just furiously writing this very note. I am too focused on getting it all down to even pause to say hello, so Zack enters ignored, which I do eventually notice. Sorry, I am writing down an intrusive thought I had, or an idea. Maybe both?
And that’s often where I leave it.
This? Is brilliant.
I was cackling like a "bog witch" the entire time I was reading.