VII. Exit Wound
When opportunity knocks, you can choose | Between Selves
From the corner of my eye I see the faint print of dried saliva in the shape of a bottom lip on the edge of a water glass. Less than a full sip of water left. A ring of gray is slightly offset to the glass on a black, stone coaster. Surrounded by personal items on a crowded coffee table, it looks more like a relic rather than an item used just thirty minutes ago, or maybe an hour.
The body is heavy, draped over the arms of a couch. And of course, I do remember it’s my body which is draped. I do remember that I can move this body. But I linger in a pause between breaths, motionless and ripe with possibility. Time stretches you know, but it also snaps back. The sound of a keyboard, my wife typing, clicking and tapping in bursts of activity punctuated by silence.
Frequently when I wake up in the morning I have no idea what day it is. A panicked feeling accompanies it, as if there’s somewhere I’m supposed to be. It’s always been like this.
The worst part about insomnia is the awareness of how many hours you have left before you have to wake up.
“If I fall asleep now, I’ll get 7 hours of sleep.”
“If I fall asleep right now, I’ll still get 5 hours of sleep.”
“What if I never fall asleep, why can’t I just sleep?” Or something like that.
A couple years ago I rearranged my schedule so that I wouldn’t have to be up early, that way at least on really bad nights I can just rest in bed, comfortably watching my thoughts and not letting the doom creep over me.
On those nights I usually don’t remember my dreams, which seems like a fair exchange. I trained myself to wake up without an alarm, and I rarely oversleep, but that panic still happens. It’s as if waking up is a shock, or the fact that I fell asleep at all must have caused time to bend.
It’s a unique luxury to wake up naturally, hearing the rhythm of your body reaching in to pull your consciousness back. An old boyfriend used to say I had an on-off switch, meaning I was fully awake and functioning normally almost immediately after waking up— I thought isn’t that what waking up is?
I struggled with sleep in my teens, and again in my mid-twenties, and then the insomnia reappeared in my mid-thirties. You could say it was the pandemic but it started before then, and it was more than that. Naturally a couple years after the sleepless nights returned my downstairs neighbor developed a new hobby of mixing music, inexplicably choosing to blast it at high volume instead of using headphones. The same hook over and over again with slight variations. The most inspiring times to create his music are after midnight and around 7am.
I like to think of myself as a “morning person,” though I don’t wake up particularly early. I’m a non-consenting night owl but that is the rhythm my body prefers.
Mornings are a special time for me, when I feel most creative. Sometimes I waste this time working and giving away all that sharpness to various tasks, but I try to take the time to write and daydream. In the summer I drink one cup of coffee and leave immediately to go swim at Brighton Beach.
Initially when I began a more rigorous meditation practice I thought it might help me sleep but it had the opposite effect. Turns out having insomnia meant that I brought a sort of superpower to the process. I was adept at staying awake no matter how deeply my body surrendered to rest, in a trance carefully held between sleeping and waking. Many people struggle with falling asleep at first, especially with my preferred practice which is done lying down, but not me. As a result, it became even harder to fall asleep at night because I couldn’t let go of awareness.
Then, after about 3 months of consecutive daily practice, an actual Miracle occurred and I taught myself to fall asleep. I learned how to take myself into deep physical relaxation and then tell my mind to completely let go, and before I knew it, I would awaken in some dream later in the night. Or even wake up in the morning, just like that. Every time it amazes me that this has worked.
There’s an element of choice now, deciding if I want to follow the thread or not. I often find these essays flow into my mind as I’m taking a long walk, or drifting off to sleep. I used to drop everything and write when I felt inspired. Now I linger in the imagining, telling myself I’ll remember the most important parts and rewrite the others. It’s my instinct to give it all away, but I’m learning to relish in the secrecy.
We all have those habits I suppose, ways we try to hold onto something ephemeral, knowing that we can’t while tightening our grip.
The writing of the essay took a very long time, I think. Or maybe it didn’t. I remembered it in pieces and fragments. But I believe it’s worth telling, there's only one way to know for sure.
Prologue
On July 10, 2014, shortly after I quit my full-time job, I was hit by a car on my way walking to the grocery store.
The first question people would ask was “Were you on a bike?” (No.) Followed by “were you crossing against the light?” (Also no.) It seemed that the sight of a young woman with a broken right arm was so disturbing that the most important detail to clarify was whether I had brought it upon myself.
Sometimes you’re just unlucky. Mostly I continued on the way I always had, somewhat worse for the wear.
Chapter 1
I delayed my honeymoon because my work schedule didn’t permit taking the time off. It was six months later in June 2017 when we took a trip to the Outer Banks, North Carolina and called it our honeymoon. On the third day I was walking down a wooden boardwalk near a marsh, it had rained just twenty minutes earlier and the wood was dark and smooth. I quickened my pace, running I guess but mainly out of excitement, when suddenly my right foot slipped out from underneath me. My legs flew forward, my body horizontal— the blue sky filled my vision. When I replay the memory I’m moving in slow motion, flying almost. And in a moment of instinct, remembering my still damaged right wrist, I turned my body to the left. I extended my left arm and landed on my hip.
I looked down, in that automatic way one does after a fall, and at the end of my forearm I saw what I could only describe as a zig-zag shape with a hand dangling at the end. A grotesque derangement that provoked a scream that was equal parts shock and horror.
Followed by, “I can’t believe this happened again.”
They say opportunity doesn’t knock twice, but in my case it did. Not that I welcomed it. I saw it more like confirmation of my worst fears about myself. I was self-employed, with no health insurance, and my fracture developed a malunion, a deformity to my wrist. The displacement of bone created a nerve injury that seared day and night. I stayed up late frantically google searching, and in the process I found my way back to myself.
Chapter 2
2018. My life had become one of ritual. I had long found refuge in this relationship but grad school and all that came with it put a distance between us. Maybe the years between then and now were a spiritual crisis I hadn’t recognized.
Ritual created a structure of movement in a pain body that was constant. I remembered a lot. I look back on that time fondly and with gratitude, though I know I didn’t feel it then. It seemed unfair to experience something so painful again.
When your body becomes an alarm that never goes off, the instinct is to detach from it. But when you can’t detach, the next best option is to see yourself as having a Self beyond the body.
Did I mention that I was a therapist?
My mind still worked, mostly, but I was starting to wonder whether I was in need of some rescuing.
It was more than a year later when I was finally able to have a reconstructive surgery, my arm rebroken and pieced back together with pins and screws.
Chapter 3
Most people don’t know I’m disabled by looking at me. I forget sometimes too until I’m using my hip to help open a jar, or shimmying onto a kayak on my stomach, my arms like flippers as I grip the sides between my elbows.
The hardest part was how my drawing changed, I suddenly had different handwriting and could barely recognize it. The best way to learn a new language is total immersion.
I call it “insider art.”
Chapter 4
In January of 2020 I was barely sleeping, more like lying down and feeling myself vibrate for six hours while I vividly dreamed.
I moved the energy through my body and confided in plants.
The sense of who I was left me before the next version arrived, and I persisted in a state of decomposition.
I dreamt of being consumed by the earth.
Chapter 5
In March 2020, I started working from home. I walked through the park every day and learned how it sounded without constant traffic and planes flying overhead. I watched the interiors of other homes through a small screen, and saw their lives not only as they were presented but how they actually were. They saw mine and there was intimacy between us.
We spoke about death, and justice, and the earth, and things that really mattered, and how to live in a body that screamed. Our hearts broke over and over again. The tiny pieces shimmered in the moonlight and coyotes sang around them.
For the first time I lived in my body. It became softer and slower, it even became more quiet. I walked ten miles a day and felt like an animal migrating. My senses heightened and I could smell the wet soil from my open window.
Chapter 6
2022. After what seemed like forever I could finally ask the question.
I was standing in front of the window in my office, which was mainly empty. There were two seagulls nesting across the street. Why seagulls would nest on the 11th floor of West 30th Street in Manhattan, I could not tell you. But here they were and twice a day they flew in front of the window, always as a pair. One, two.
One Tuesday they flew east and never returned, and I moved out.
Chapter 7
My father had a stroke at the age of 50, just two months after I left my mother’s home at age 16, and moved in with family who were practically strangers. I was adrift on couches and spare beds. In those years I had to give up so much to begin again.
It seemed predictable, inevitable even, that in my late 30s I was already developing many of the same health issues. A legacy that lived in my veins was gripping me. But I was determined to change it.
In yogic philosophy, there is a mantra that lives in the breath— So’ham, I am that. If you listen carefully you can hear it ride along the breath. It has a vibration and once you find it you carry it with you.
As I lay awake, surrounded by mostly male doctors who were injecting anesthesia and removing parts of my body, I repeated it silently.
Hundreds of times, So’ham.
I am that.
I held myself, I whispered in her ear, I carried her home, and I laid beside her as she slept.
I was a prism bending the light.
I was the pit that emerges from stolen fruit.
I was a puddle in the street reflecting the sky.
She was the tiny sliver of moon on a cloudless night.
Chapter 8
Some people say that before you touch a person who has been struck by lightning, you must check for the exit wound. The body can conduct the energy, and will hold it until it exits, transferring the shock to you.
This is a myth.
It is also a myth that lightning never strikes the same place twice.
In a direct strike, sometimes the current moves along the surface of the skin, a flashover. Other times it moves through the cardiovascular and nervous system, and it can stop the heart. Electricity can travel through the air, the ground, and through contact with charged objects.
When a shock occurs by contact, the current will exit at the point of the body furthest away from the contact point.
The greater the space between these points, the more likely the shock will cause death.
Sometimes the person will appear lifeless when they are only unconscious, and can be revived.
Epilogue
The last sip of water is room temperature. It’s almost sunset and I get up to refill my glass. My feet rest on a warm spot on the wooden floor. A siren wails outside the window, alerting the neighborhood that Shabbat will start soon.
I switch on the light and reclaim my spot on the couch. I rest my head back and stare at the ceiling. Slants of light intersecting, cool air flowing past my nostrils. For a moment I feel as if I could fall asleep.
But instead, I write a letter to my younger self:
Exit Wound is the final installment of the first movement of Spaces Between, the second movement begins in September 2024
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