I bloomed late and after two weeks of suppressed dreams on oxycodone I was coaxed out on a medically advised walk and heard music in my mind once again after so long in a haze of silence. Years later but a picosecond in memory after I dreamt of the bamboo my mother hates overtaking, flooding, consuming the carefully maintained Japanese-inspired all-natives water-feature-pond’d backyard—
overweeded overwatered overdone, soil overturned and overtrodden, overfertilized and overmade, overloved and by the bamboo broken like the cracks turned gaping chasm turned two clean halves of the beloved yoke, at last transformed into a true paradise—
like the kind I found myself in — you aren’t supposed to wake up during surgery, but I’m resistant to anaesthesia. Narcotics, sedatives, stimulants, only sensitive to a few things — light, sound, metoclopramide of all things after my liver gave up in graduate school. Due to graduate school, but not. This was years ago. I woke up at some point—
during top surgery, fully conscious like how I wasn’t later, conscious like when you wake at 4 a.m. from a dream into reality without bleedover. I don’t remember blood—
I just remember looking down, lifting my head and tilting my chin, seeing flatness, finally, and feeling the numbness but through the numbness the astonishing and gorgeous lack. Like those shadow puzzles—
putting one shape over another, only slotting in when they match, my mind aligned with my body. I don’t have colour tattoos, though I think purple would be nice — I am covered, likewise, in shadows—
not in an emo way. The sting of the needle is identical to a cat-scratch, that’s what I say to anyone and everyone who asks Did it hurt? when they see the one on my hand. I laugh, tell them my hands are used to pain from the real cats that I have. No, the greater pain was on my shoulderblade—
the right-side one where I have a crow alive and beautiful, watching me always. I used to feed the crows in college. It felt like my skin was being pulped, becoming ground meat, like if you stuck your finger in it and wiggled around you’d form a hole. Skin as clay—
they tapped at my skin, flicked it on the back of my hand because when I am hungry my body temperature plummets. Not anymore, but bear with me in the present past — my body temperature plummets and so I lay spreadeagle on the operating table in an outpatient cosmetic surgery center in an office building within five minutes’ walk of the biggest still-active shopping mall in a hundred fifty miles—
I didn’t know about that until my partner took me there, raving about it and I looked around and felt strange euphoric joy burbling up in my chest, like flowers blooming inside and I said, This is where—
and did you know, I asked my partner out by giving him a pebble and talking about penguins? I asked my friends whether they thought he knew that I might like him after coming home from cuddling together on the couch for four hours straight and they said, Yes, and laughed with me at my flush, my giddiness, my euphoria, my euphoria—
my euphoria, the gas mask on and at first it was oxygen and I was so calm, listening to the monitor beep and like every surgical patient before me had the totally unique idea of bringing something with me as I went under, and for me it was music — I wanted to play music in my head and see where the track skipped to when I woke, but I forgot because I was so focused on the EKG and sitting up so they could put the electrodes on my back because my chest was going to be occupied by hands and scalpels, soon, and my anaesthesiologist put something into the IV in my hand, not the bag already set up and told me it would feel odd and at first it didn’t and then it did — I felt everything inside. And then they held the plastic mask firmly over my face and told me to take several deep breaths — I did so and at first it was still normal and then it was tasted of sharp metallic mint turquoise green—
and euphoria, long after in time but not in spirit, waking from the numbing of further anaesthesia in my mind and body after they saw that I was awake and sent me back, fully conscious again and looking at the wrapping on my chest and lying in a bed that would become oily and indented with the shape of my body over the coming weeks as I recovered—
and years later, after my hysterectomy, after gabapentin and hallucinations and nibbles from a cracker and pee made half of blood, after a car ride home with bounces over speedbumps that jostled my organs and gave me exquisite knowledge of everything inside, I was desperate to know when I could do push-ups again. And I was delighted to discover so many others who had the same experience, because hysterectomy post-op instructions used to be to never move again, but now it’s the opposite — the more you move after you are healed, the stronger you will be. It was feared that the organs and intestines that used to be supported by the uterus and connective tissues there would descend and prolapse — we now know that it’s a situational thing and not to worry overmuch, and live as you live because fear is forever if you let it be that way. So I had my hysterectomy—
and my top surgery before that, and tattoos between all of those and slowly my body is becoming the one I imagine when I think about myself — it suits me, feels right. No more binding, though my ribs are still malformed after years of swimming with constriction and my bones still aren’t right and nor is my skin — there’s always something, but I’m learning to live with it in a good way, and I see the sky is pink and blue and white and I’m beneath it and today I am hurt but it is not my fault because—
I do what I love and I love whom I love and I see and say and do things out of love, now. Not always, but I try — it’s taken a lot of work, truly, but I don’t want perfection. And I don’t want eradication of that which came before, either — I want a flood of bamboo, a forest of leaves that sing. I love the life I’ve made, the people I’m with, the places I’ve seen and the ways I have gone and I’m collecting things that I loved about myself before, bringing them forward into the future with me and I think I know the future but if I’m wrong that’s okay because I’ll still be me and I think— and I think— and—
I think that I love myself too.
Because dogwood trees don't bloom with the petals you think you see — they are like poinsettias and so on, have something called bracts which are specialized leaves that act like petals but last much longer. Because, as always, I am not a firework — I feel like one here, but I do not die. I live so much longer and do not fade, because I am immortal until proven otherwise.