There is a scar down my sternum and two jagged cuts above my left breast. There are bruises there, too, old ones, ones that never heal. They itch; sometimes they burn. These are not dormant things. I lift my fingers to touch my chest, and I coil back. Before my skin can even make contact with its own body, I startle. I’ve never noticed it before, I’ve never called it out, but of course it’s true. I cannot touch myself where I’m hurt. I cannot lay my own fingers on my skin.
I’m not ready, I think. I am not ready to put my hands on the most vulnerable place, to feel with my own fingers the damage that has been done to me.
So don’t touch, I think.Just look.
I force myself to meet my own eyes in the mirror. I force myself to see the person across from me. She is wrecked and wretched and distorted. She has been pulled apart. I think about all the times I got dressed hastily, all the times I’ve worn a turtleneck in the dead of summer, all the times I refused to meet my own body. Every time I turned it over to someone who did not care.
I couldn’t look at it because I thought seeing it would mean I’d have to acknowledge the truth: that I was damaged, that I’d never again be organized, tidy—fuck it,feminine. But I was wrong. Standing here now I see it. All the glorious reality that makes me who I am. A whole person. A discombobulated whole, a whole that has been stitched and sutured and stapled, but a whole nonetheless.
We have to be cracked open sometimes. We have to be cracked open sometimes to let anything good in. What I see now, emerging in the mirror, is this one, simple truth: learning to be broken is learning to be whole.
I float my hands over my heart. I hover them there. Hummingbirds at the fountain.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. Out loud. It’s a small space and I say it quietly, but I say it. “No matter what, I’m never leaving you.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
When I lived with my parents all those years of my extended adolescence, my father and I would have coffee together every morning. He likes to wake up early, just before sunrise, and since I was a light sleeper then, his kitchen rhythms would soon have me out of bed and sitting next to him at the table. We never talked much, just allowed each other to slowly come awake.
“I used to dread the morning because it meant I had to rush out of the house. Then I realized even if I can’t make the day longer, I can make the morning earlier,” he said.
I never became a morning person. I was only ever awake to see the sunrise during those few hazy years. But now I think maybe I’ve been missing out. Maybe he’s onto something.
I show up at my parents’ house the next morning at seven and knock softly at the door. I hear my father’s padded footsteps and then there he is—bleary-eyed, his hair standing up every which way, an early-morning Einstein.
“Daphne,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
A common refrain. But I don’t answer. I just start crying. I feel myself exhale and exhale and exhale—everything, all of it. The past five months, the past five years, this decade of being strong and stoic, of never letting myself think or feel the reality of my situation. I exhale the holding back. Of my health, of my heart, of all these paper threads.
“Sweetheart,” he says. He puts his arms around me. He holds me close to him. I smell his toothpaste and coffee and yesterday’s skin. “Come on in.”
I am seated at the counter in my parents’ kitchen. My father takes a mug down from the cabinet over the sink and fills it. He dumps in a little creamer—Coffee mate, Irish Crème—and gives it a stir with a spoon. He hands it to me.
“You’re sad,” he says.
I take a sip. It’s hot and sweet. “Captain Obvious.” I smile over the rim of my cup. “I don’t know,” I say. I swallow. Out it comes. “I’m not sure I want to get married.”
It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud like this. Maybe it’s even the first time I’ve let myself think it: all the words, right in a row.
My father reacts. I see the surprise on his face, and then the mitigated efforts at resolution. “OK,” he says. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“Oh,” he tells me. “I think you are. No one says something like that without a little thought grunt work first. Take me through it.”
I put my hands around my mug. I click my nails against the blue ceramic. My parents bought these mugs on a trip to Seattle.I know because in the past ten years, it’s the only vacation they ever took.
You’re not the only one who has sacrificed, I think.
“You know, when I got sick it made sense to me, in a strange way. It’s like there was always something different about me, like I behaved different, my life was different. I thought I deserved it. But now—I don’t want to punish myself anymore.”
My father nods. It’s cool in the kitchen, and he still wears his robe over his pajamas. It’s a blue paisley terry cloth. My mother ordered a striped one from a catalog and they sent this floral one instead. “Why can’t I wear it?” I remember my father asking. “I like flowers, too.”
“What changed?”
“Time?” I say, although I think maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s something else, some other unseeable force.
“Jake is a nice guy,” my father says. “We’d be happy to have him as a part of our family.”
