Jessica
My body is a process of forgetting.
This is what I thought to myself last week, while I was on vacation in Mexico. I was taking a beach-side yoga class, listening to the waves lick the shore, and marvelling at how well I have healed. Four years ago, I had arthroscopic knee surgery following a dislocation, and I was afraid that I would never be able to bend my knee again. Yet, here I was in lotus position, pressing my thighs further down, and leaning in to the stretch.
That morning, as the teacher guided us through meditation, I thought about all of the scars I had healed, all of the injuries I had rehabilitated. The teacher told us to look inside of our bodies and I imagined my leg riddled with scar tissue and mended muscle. I thought about how far my body has come, how my relationship to it has changed.
That little other voice in me kept repeating this phrase, like the kernel of a poem. I thought about the body’s duty to helps me forget, the ways in which it protects me. The memory of pain is still powerful, but the experience often seems muted, far away. This is it’s job, to help me to walk through life without the fear of pain.
The irony is that two days later, I remembered, I re-experienced what it was like. While in my hotel room, I slipped on a small puddle of water, and dislocated my knee again. The same knee that I had surgery on, the same knee I rehabilitated. The same knee I had learn to trust in the four years without incident.
The experience of severe, intense pain is one that even now, four days later, I have trouble describing. When thinking about it, it seems unreal. I remember flashes, but not the whole two and a half hours that my knee was dislocated. I remember screaming, trying to breathe normally, the eerie calm that descended when I was in the ambulance. The look of my knee cap resting outside of its home, stretching my skin. I remember doing my best to be polite, to speak the full extent of my traveler’s Spanish when talking to the doctors, nurses, paramedics, X-Ray techs, and hotel employees. I remember trying not to cuss, trying not to cry, trying to remain both present and not present in this pain.
Now, I am just as fully in my body as I was last week in yoga class. I can still see inside of my leg, envision the places where I am bruised and swollen. I feel every muscle twitch, every throb, every swing of my injured and braced leg. I am also trying to forget again, even as flashes of memory remind me of my new (and old) injury.
