shall we?

the end (beginning) times/life since i last saw you

me and all of you

Two Thursdays ago, I dissected my first cadaver. I did not experience the feelings I assumed would arise with being presented with the dead, a product of what is done to a body to preserve it for anatomical study, I’m sure. The blood vessels are drained and pumped with formaldehyde, and what was once flushed, soft and warm, becomes gray-green, tough, and bloated. It is no longer instinctually recognizable as the corpse of a formerly alive individual, and the smell of its preservative lingers in your nose and on your fingers, despite the gloves. It appears as an object, a “body donor”, as my professors say. Upon flaying the cadaver, tucked right under the skin, I found that the muscles in our backs responsible for bringing our arms up and our ribs out look like huge, feathered, folded wings. Peel them from the spine as I did and they stretch outward on either side, just the same. This Thursday, I sawed the skull of my body donor open, and smelling bone against metal felt distinctly like being at the worlds worst dentist, which I could barely stand. My cadaver was a 100-year-old woman who died of the atrophy of the mind and body that comes with old age. The next day, I held her brain in my two hands.

I’ve been permanently moved out of Austin for over three weeks. Despite my lifelong resistance to change, I think I have a skill in compartmentalization when it occurs, one that only falters early in the morning before I can quite remember which apartment I’m sleeping in, or when I picture the wrong fridge while at the grocery store. Everything has completely, abruptly swung in the opposite direction of what it once was. I’ve spent the past few years giving my every coherent and incoherent second up to a city, a few well-loved apartments and places, and all the kind people in between and then asking for it all back in several pieces to stitch myself into what felt like the fabric of the world with and say, Look. This is who I was. This is how I lived. Nothing has ever felt as awfully natural as stretching myself so thin across a summer’s worth of sun-baked, idling afternoons, warm and stupidly giggly evenings crowded on a couch or a patio, and nights of dancing like I need to, knowing it will all be different soon, going home only to catch my breath so I can tell you i’m there to doing it all again tomorrow.

Fortunately, medical school is effective at distracting me from how far I am from what largely made me into who I am now, and I’m not left with too much time or energy to dwell on how much of that life I will not get back. To have immediate goals that need to be met in hours or days, that require gathering back up again the discipline I’ve left by the wayside for over a year now. It’s a shift I feared I would not grow accustomed to, but we are all more adaptable than we think, and I wake up each morning ready (at varying degrees) to keep trying.

There are a growing number of familiar faces among my classmates now. It’s comforting to be able to find one another in the spaces we’ll be traversing for the years to come, stop to chat, and spiritedly complain about our long evenings of poring over material we signed up (begged on our hands and knees, really) to learn. On Friday, fifty or so of us met at a bar nearby to celebrate the end of what was described to us as one of the worst weeks of the semester. After bouncing between the circles of friends starting to define themselves, yelling myself hoarse over inane music, and having those often alcohol-induced conversations that lead to phone number exchanges because you both know this is the beginning of something you came to this thing looking for, I’m starting to believe there are ways to love this new life of mine. It won’t ever be what it was, but there are good bones here too.

one of those poems that rattles around in me forever