Wounds

Went 4-0 in Write Club tonight!  Nick Tecosky and Myke Johns have taken to calling me "The Murderer."  I'll take that.  Tonight's Topic:  Wound.  

Wounds

by Michael Otieno Molina

So I have these two perfect little bloody pot holes on the knuckles of my your fault, fuck you fingers.  They are working to become scabs now, but at first they were that beautiful, deep watercolor red, like right before you spread it on a canvas, or in my case wipe it on a sandy shirt.  Ouch.  But you have to let it breathe. 

When you slap a band-aid on it it gets all mushy and pink and white and gross like fat hanging off raw chicken.  You have to let it breathe.  But it’s damn painful to walk around with open wounds.

So how did I get these two perfect little bloody pot holes on the knuckles of my your fault and fuck you fingers?  I am in the Dominican Republic vacationing with this asinine fine, brilliant butter WILF (hey my love) and our two gorgeous, good kids.  I’m feeling myself. 

So I’m high up on the surface of about twelve feet of clean-air-clear water with my child’s snorkeling goggles when I spot a bone white piece of coral ready to be plucked and brought through customs to add character to our little garden back home.

I plunge and immediately this tiny snorkeling mask floods with salt water, burning like piss in my eyes.  But I’m under about 6 feet now and half way, I’m not going to stop.  I kick hard to go deeper and reach the rock.   It won’t budge. 

I got some breath left so I dig my figners around the thing and turn toward the surface ripping up as hard as I can.  I feel the tearing of my skin, but am more concerned that the bastard rock hasn’t moved and I look down as I float to the surface and realize that this little bump of dead coral, the shape, size, and look of a human brain is actually part of a huge mammoth of living rock.  It’s a little dead scar that the coral wasn’t clinging to.  And that’s the danger of scars.

Scars are zombie skin, dead and done healing.  They are cave drawings of battles won and lost, the tattoos of childhood.  We hide scars as much as we celebrate them, their etchings egos in themselves.  And one day we will all be scars, mounds of dead flesh, capped with a concrete slab carved with a name, yet another scar of a society come and done.

Scars are dead, only useful when plucked from an ocean of experience and plunked in a yard of tired stories I can tell a million times about the time I ripped my fingers open trying to pick up an entire coral reef.

Scars are the story without the milieu of contextual details – like the fact I wore my child’s goggles because I was too cheap to buy my own (I mean I’m really not made of pesos) – scars are trophies, they never feel as good as winning, never feel as bad as third place.   

But wounds, wouns are the victory lap that hurts so good.  Wounds are for the living.  Only the living feel.  The pain of a wound is proof that there still a will to live screaming “Something’s aint right!”  The pain lets you know your body works.  If you go numb, worry.

I remember coming in here to Kavarna during some serious personal challenges and, after not seeing her for a while, I ran into Sirkka.    Sirkka who while I was in Kavarna studying for the bar exam burned for me a Girl Talk mix c.d. that I bumped hard when I found out I passed.  Sirkka who will proudly play Too Short’s Freaky Tales up in here, while hipsters and graduate students squirm to my quiet horror and delight.   Sirrka who caught me bringing outside food in and chastised me with a gentle, firm “come on, man.” Sirkka, who had showed me the magic pouches she made of plastic bags and told me of the miracle she had made of a sudden and horrifying illness.  I ran into Sirka and found that she had been having challenges and complications with that illness.   That a wound hadn’t completely healed.  I remember Sirkka saying “I’m just glad to be able at work again.”  What a beautiful and simple expression of the will to live.

Wounds prove you are alive.  When your skin breaks and you see the pink meat beneath, when the slow red flow well up and leaks from a clean slice, when you can’t help but flick at, rub on, and peel off the little scarab of scab that follows, when a nondescript spot on your body is rebranded and a scar is born, wounds prove you are alive.  So ‘begrudge them not their sloth and scorn, what wound did ever heal but by degrees’ wrote one William Shakespeare.’

And when typing this writing about wounds my your fault and fuck you fingers are in heavy locomotion, bopping up and down with unconscious precision when I realize that my your fault and fuck you fingers have a third story to tell about wounds.  Wounds are the injury themselves (somebody’s fault), the pain the injury causes (Fuck!), and the healing process that both things initiate (peace).  Like one plus one is three, the cause, the effect, and the result. 

And today I walk back in here to muse on wounds with the great wound on human civilization that is the Israeli-Palestine conflict raging with the infection of vengeance and fear, with the wound that is the border between the U.S. and Mexico flaring on both sides with the trauma of drug wars and the war on drugs, tonight I walk in here for Sirkka and remember the blessing it is to be alive to be able to work for the world and write for the world, as painful as it can be, as fruitless as it can seem.   And sometimes it’s nobody’s fault, there’s no one to flip off, and death is the only peace from the pain. 

And sometimes finding somebody or something to blame offers a momentary relief.  And that’s OK.  “It’s your fault ocean for being a habitat for coral and your fault you coral for dying, but holding on to a bit of yourself to tempt me to snorkel down and rip it off for my garden and your fault cheap ass snorkeling goggles for kids for making it hard for me to see what was right in front of me and your fault Obama that the dollar isn’t worth more so that I could buy adult goggles and your fault mama for making me the cheap bastard I am and your fault God for taking my mama from me too young so I couldn’t tell her this story so Fuck you!”

And after blaming your makers and cursing everything under the sun, you find peace.  I don’t know what will come of all this trouble.  But this wound, this pain let’s me know one thing.  I am alive.  And as long as I’m alive I will fight for my life.   Just like Sirkka.

And we might be flesh, but we are also bone, and bones may break and shatter and splinter and fracture, but they don’t scar, they never die.  And under the right conditions, our bones can live to tell our story thousands of years after I’m gone.  And if an archaeologist discovers me in a flash of white and in hasty excitement digs his hands in the dirt and in the process rips a few pot holes in his skin he might just see two fingers saying “your fault, so fuck you.”  Now take this wound, take a break from studying the dead, and live.  Peace.