Burned thumb
On Saturday night I burned all the skin of the pad of my left thumb. It was the kind of banal kitchen mishap that happens all the time, especially when you’re cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen. I ran it under cold water as long as I could but then I had to keep cooking dinner, which I did with my thumb always near an ice pack. The top layer of skin turned white immediately and it hurt all night, the kind of pain that registers as slightly more than annoying, slightly less than stop-everything-and-panic. I ate the dinner I’d been making when I burned my thumb, I helped put the kids to bed, and then I passed out, exhausted from being in pain and exhausted from acting, out of necessity, like I wasn’t. In the morning it still hurt but much less, and the top layer of white skin had toughened and died, though the skin under it was raw and hurt when pressed or used (I discovered how often I use my left hand to turn on lamp switches).
On Monday the blister formed then popped (disgusting! and satisfying, of course) and then the dead skin that had been the blister started peeling off. The skin underneath was tender and livid red that day. The next day that same red skin was hard and cracked. The perimeter of the wound got progressively smaller. Today, the site of the burn is hard and shiny but a much lighter color, almost the same color as the rest of my thumb.
It’s so tiny but reassuring that without my having to consciously do anything my body can heal itself like this. All progress is incremental and not always linear is something I tell myself all the time, multiple times a day. But at least in the case of my burned thumb it is linear! Eventually my thumb will be as good as new, or maybe there will be a slightly shiny scar for a while to remind me of the time when, on the eve of my 38th birthday, I picked up a hot pan without a potholder.
This morning I got up too late to make the snack we’d signed up to bring to Ilya’s class. What a privilege to be out and about in the world in the pre-9am hour, when the rained-on city is fresh and crisp and new and some bodegas and delis are not even open yet! After I dropped him off I had to go three blocks out of my way to find a place that would sell me some plastic clamshells full of cut-up fruit. But it gave me the opportunity to walk past the house on Livingston, surrounded now on all sides by new construction, where a man keeps a pigeon coop on the roof. The birds wheeled across the sky in their perfectly choreographed formations like I’d seen them do so many times from my window, during the 7 years when my window had looked out onto Franklin Avenue. I miss our old place so much. In my dreams we still live there, and I wake up every morning surprised that we don’t.
If I could go back there, though, I wouldn’t. Progress is incremental and not always linear. I hope that some process is happening underneath the conscious layer of my mind that will show me where to go next.