Reflection

A Poem by Queen O'Spades

This piece is about preparing to leave the hospital after life-saving emergency surgery. My health is a constant struggle of chronic illness. I began writing to cope.

I had been sequestered long enough to have missed the lake effect’s majority.

The deep inches of snow, packed down over weeks, were new to my feet.

More recent storms had thawed and frozen the landscape again and again in my absence. So much had happened in only weeks. Or was it months or years?

Had the seasons cycled through, arriving yet again at winter? I could be easily convinced of this lapse in time. Surely the clocks had stood still, or maybe sped up. Perhaps, I’m in a whole new reality. Some barrier of time and space must have been altered to allow for this extreme disorientation. Everything has changed.

I crept too close to the edge. My body was not my own, barely a body at all.

The parts of me once curved and soft were deflated and brittle.

The parts of me still swollen were held together by staples and tape.

I had come too close to dying.

I sat up on the bed, forced upright by my battered arms and dried up fingers

scarcely able to support my own weight with my weakened limbs

I looked down at myself, the metal track laid out below, between the bruises.

The tape and plastic, foreign to my eyes, but already part of my anatomy

Self preservation worked quickly to tear my eyes off my shattered self

But irony had placed a mirror on the wall where my eyes landed next

The sink under the glass is strangely centered inside the room

Outside of the bathroom with the rest of the plumbing

A foreshadowing that my personal care had been forever altered?

Above the sink, echoed in the glass, is someone I’ve never seen

The sharpness of my collar bone, the awkward turn of my shoulders

The skin covering my flattened breasts is dry and flaking, aged

Despite the natural light spilling from the window, the room is dim,

the fluorescents muted in daylight, the walls blue without the clinical glow

my pallor was grey and yellowed, translucent, my veins laid out as if a map

Like an old newspaper, sodden and then dried up harshly by the sun

I wear fluid around my middle, a wrap patterned in green, purple, and sickly yellow

The only part of me that is flush and rounded, sitting on my hips like an inner tube

Now I see the incision, clearer somehow in reflection than from my own glance

Ten inches of evenly spaced, stapled flesh broken in half by overlapping bandages

It isn’t until my gaze has traveled up my likeness, and stopped on my face

That the shock and awe of this exercise strikes me numb with disbelief.

My orbs are dark and cavernous, the blue green and white is absent, drowned in the pure black of my pupils, stained grey and rimmed with reddish purple shadows

It isn’t only my eyes that are sunken, but also the gouged hollows of my cheeks, My nose appears longer, angular, while even my cheek bones lack prominence

My brow line defined by overgrowth, my jaw sharp and chin protruding

My skin seemed to have tightened around my skull, with nothing layered between

My first impression of those sick, ghostly features is etched eternally in my mind.

I’ve been introduced to a stranger, unaware that she will soon become my sentry. This broken shell of a woman follows me, replicated in mirrors for years to come. Those eyes staring back at me endlessly, haunting me with all they’ve seen

In time, that reflection becomes more recognizable than the girl I knew.

But sometimes I’ll be caught in a moment of reflection, lured to a curve or shallow that whispers of my old façade. The line of my breast curling to my ribcage,

the subtle bow of my hip and waistline, a youthful expression that lifts my face.

The girl that existed before I saw the mirrored imposter has long since disappeared.

But a new woman rose from the broken down husk, her shoulders pulled back, straight and strong, holding me up like marionette strings. Until the fatigue cut the threads one by one, collapsing her into a heap of self pity, craving dreamless sleep.

She carried her sensual memories with her to this new body. They weigh her down like lead in her pockets, begging to be skipped away like stones. To remember a touch is to feel it linger on my skin, my nerves on fire, then fizzling to a slow burn. Desperate for the sense memory to be replaced with a fresh, tender moment.

I’m waiting for the world to again spin off its axis, to disorient me from time. To bring me to a place where this is further in the past. Far enough behind me to let it go. But that new woman, who patched herself together, isn’t ready to move on. Tangled puppet strings tie her to the present, trapping her in this bed of aching.