pain

Healing and forgetting

Looking south down the edge of Manhattan from the Little Island, in winter

The scars on my side are ten years old. I pass the anniversary in San Francisco, and bike to Four Barrel at 7 am for a coffee to celebrate. Sitting outside in the chilly morning air, with my e-bike on hold next to me, I look around at how much has changed, and how much hasn’t. Just under ten years ago I spent 45 minutes walking the two blocks to this coffee shop, pausing on a fire hydrant to cry, uncertain of whether to continue or return home. I was in pain, and alone, out of reach of medicine or friends.

Ten years later the scars on my side are an afterthought. The double slashes of two chest tubes, done a week apart, are easy to miss. They aren’t the scars I notice in the mirror, dwarfed in visibility by the eight holes on the same shoulder, the remnants of twenty twenty’s reconstruction. And the shoulder scars aren’t even the most recent, themselves overshadowed in freshness by the three on my stomach from this January. Ten years has brought a lot of change, some of it good and some of it the gradual wear and tear of life, the slow abrasion and sudden breaks.

I haven’t forgotten everything, though. The second chest tube scar has faded, but the memory of the incision hasn’t. It remains the most painful experience of my life, an evening I hope not to top. The more recent scars, perhaps more invasive, were at least planned, and I was properly sedated. Our hospital list grows much faster than our emergency room list, for which I am grateful. I am grateful for so much, really. For medicine, for health insurance that spans countries, for friends who’ve given advice by phone and carried us home on their backs. For friends who’ve offered up sofas, and brought food. It’s a long list, and good to remember on anniversaries like this, even as I forget.

And so, biking across the city I used to live in on this chilly March morning, I try to be grateful for the distance, for the progress we’ve made since. Our ten year anniversary comes shortly after this less auspicious one. Our cat is almost twelve. Our daughter will be two in June. We’ve lived in Hong Kong more than half the decade since, something that would have been hard to predict. And we still love New York, planting good memories over and around the painful ones, as the years accumulate.

Another strange night

A view across Hong Kong toward Tai Hang and Braemar hill behind.

I go to bed in a hospital room. From the window I can see our apartment. This is closer to home than any of our other hospital stays, and less stressful. We age, we injure, we heal. Or we go through the traumas of childbirth, and heal. The pain is not always evenly distributed. It is shared though, which is both comforting and real. I look across the sports fields beside the Hong Kong Central library at Tai Hang, at our tiny box, the lights that mean home, that mean people, and relax.

I’ll be out of here in another twelve hours. I’ll probably still have a job. Things aren’t always as bad as they have been, and there’s a lot of hope in our corner of the world. A lot of growth, new words, new abilities. Hopefully some of the old abilities, too, returning after rehab and intention, after focus and time.

We get older, and we keep going to the gym. Our fitness plans remain much the same, climbing frisbee yoga and the occasional jog, on either side of these milestones. On either side of these years. My shoulder, the cause of that stay in twenty twenty, is pretty functional. I boulder on it, lay out on it, swing on it, and carry a small child with it. The rehab took a long time, but I had little to do. Tomorrow’s rehab will be lighter, more like the last op than the shoulder. More like stiches rather than reconstruction. I’m happy with that, happy with the ability to fix things before they’re impossible.

“You woke up smelling horrible every day. Like pain,” my partner says of the three months pre-shoulder surgery. “After surgery you immediately smelled like yourself again.”

Smelling like myself instead of like pain seems like a big step. The gift of a mediocre memory, of being unable to hold my body’s prior feelings very well, is that I do not remember. I hope never to remember. I hope to read these words in a few years and be startled by them.

“Do you re-read your own writing,” a friend asked me in December.

All the time, I said. All the time. It’s a way of remembering, of anchoring myself. Most of these posts are written for me, to help me tell the story of my life, across time, to myself.

Because otherwise I’d forget. Otherwise I might never remember all the things I’ve done. I might not remember who I am, or who I’m trying to be. I definitely wouldn’t remember how it felt, ten or fifteen years back, to discover things I now struggle to notice. I might not remember all those nights listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack in Chinese hotel rooms, happy and healthy or sick and uncertain. I wouldn’t remember all my odd interactions with friends, or what it felt like to drive the PCH before finding a job in San Francisco.

Sometimes, when it’s hard to remember, it’s good to be able to remember, to have triggers. To create them. I do it with music a lot, and with people. Mostly, though, I do it with this site, with writing, and with time.

It’s another kind of healing, perfect for this quiet hospital room.