‘Your skin is glowing,’ they say, like porcelain when I’m a child, when I’m so depressed I’m sure I can’t breathe, when I had surgery that morning. ‘You’d never be able to tell,’ says my friend, cheerfully.
‘You were a real puker as a kid,’ my mom tells me.
I don’t remember. I remember crying, crying so hard I can’t talk, my anger etching into myself as the grown ups just look on, shrug.
I pushed it down, my face became smooth to match, like an egg I tell myself sitting across, sitting across my lying boss, my yelling partner, national tragedy, sitting still, an egg.
‘Can I touch?’ they ask, ‘it looks so soft.’
I’m a little proud of how well I tolerate anesthesia, how it unfazes me, but this time I wake up sobbing, shaking, clutching my face, shaking my head that anything hurts, nodding for the sedative.
I didn’t tell many people. I guess I felt embarrassed to make it too big of a deal. I mean I already had the same surgery last year. Or maybe something else. No one mentions it.
‘Memorabilia?’ my housemate asks of the surgical bracelets I’m still wearing, name washed out.
One time in high school some older guys got my friend and I so high I was floating on music notes and then my arm was drilling through the earth, the pain shaking my whole body, I was yelling. ‘Are you okay?’ they asked. ‘What would you do if I wasn’t?’ The looks on their faces. I stop yelling.
So I’m always okay.
I keep my face smooth, an egg, it glows, you look good you look healthy, sure I say, wanting them to hold me and never let go and instead I go to my room and shut the door.
