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Recognizing Hurt

Updated: Apr 1, 2022

Some month in 2020 (I think it was?) - spring, probably or June I crashed really hard. I couldn't consume anything without barfing it back up. A sip of water, an ice chip, nada.

Harald got up to go to work one morning and I managed to say enough crazy talk about turtles that he picked me up and he drove to the hospital. I had a broken shoulder at the time...so yes, June 2020.


I remember snippets of that day:

  • In the car, while H ran to grab a nurse I kept saying over and over again: "mummy. mummy help me."

  • Me asking a nurse if I was going to die, and she said "we're doing everything we can to make sure you don't, hon"and patted my good arm.

  • Nurses asking each other if I was homeless (due to my neck to toe psoriasis). I don't have any memory after that, until a few days later when they let me out.

Weird. None of this had anything to do with my liver.. That organ was working away, and we were friends. [At publication, the two are not on speaking terms. - Ed.]


At home a week later, I happened to see the news, and they showed George Floyd's murder. With his last breaths he called for his mom. I lost it. I felt it in my bones, in all of me as a person. A cry to my mother is the last thing I expected to happen, given maman's shenanigans over the years.


i cried and sobbed liked a fucking baby, on the floor, and just rocking back and forth. For how long I have no idea. I don't know how to soothe myself, so I end up still raw and hurting.


One can never predict what they'll do in a scenario. I still yearned for comfort, in some deep, hidden place inside of my heart/head, clearly. It will never happen in real life, that comfort. I wanted to believe for a long time that I was iron-clad, resolutely against any contact with her, that nothing affected me. Well, that's a big lie.


So, in an effort to strip away artifice in this era (like the Age of Innocence, except call it the Age of DGAF) I have to learn how to be peaceful with this needy child, and love her. How? Now's the time.




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