Fair warning: some graphic descriptions of injury and gore.

The body holds onto such strange, specific things.

Two months ago in Brooklyn I broke into an unexpected jazz split on a slippery post-rain subway grate. My left knee took the brunt of the fall in its entirety—well, physically, at least, with my ego taking the brunt of the oh my fucking god could we NOT do something that made everyone else mortifyingly aware of our dumb existence? I have never been significantly injured in my life (and I give thanks for that good fortune all the time, knock on wood) and the pain and soreness, the way it radiated out of my knee even when I was just sitting there, was new to me. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac, so I wondered whether it was safe to fly, if I had broken something, if my knee would balloon up overnight. Yes, no, no. It bruised, but not as bad as I thought it would; it hurt, but not when I was just sitting there anymore; I ran on it less than a week later just fine.

But then I tried to do my simple yoga routine. I was shocked: I couldn’t support my weight on it at all, it was too painful. I hobbled through modified versions on that side and figured it would heal after a bit of time. I tried a few more times in the subsequent days: same outcome. I would physically break out into a sweat trying to do a crescent lunge, my mind (admittedly a neurodivergent one that deals worse with persistent, mild discomfort than serious injury) thrashing as I tried to tough out the 10-count. Life got busy; my yoga routine disappeared for a stretch. I finally did it again within the last week, and while I can put my weight on it now without perspiring, that shit still hurts.

Over a year ago, I was warming up for a run. I was already dealing with tendonitis in my left ankle that would wreck my running schedule for half a year, and my mood was low, and I was doing leg swings in a new location, in an awkward position that was not my norm. My mind was wandering; I was distracted. I brought my left leg down across my body, and instead of brushing gently through the space between me and the wall, my left heel came down on my right big toe like a hammer. It fucking hurt. I skipped my run; I worried I’d broken it; I pictured my toe nail dying and falling off. The next day, the nail was still there, but it had turned a deep purple already and gunk oozed out from under its edges. As days passed, the nail remained, but bloated above its usual bed, filled with fluid that it was retaining now, gunk that wasn’t going anywhere, that eventually seemed to harden into a shiny, thickened nail. As months went by and the nail grew out, a fault line moved up it, marking the point in time that the injury had occurred.

Over a year later, a quarter inch of the damaged nail remains at the very top, clipped shorter every time, the jagged white sliver of its end growing closer and closer to the top, to disappearance, to oblivion. One day no evidence will remain.

Twenty-five years ago, I was starting my second round of braces. The first round had arguably been done too early, and had fixed some of my teeth but not all. In a particularly weird turn, my left adult incisor would not drop into my mouth: it had parked itself under the gum in the space between my teeth and my nose and refused to move. The only way to get to it was to surgically uncover it, slap a bracket on it, and yank that motherfucker down.

The surgery was whatever; I was not anxious or afraid. I got to bring any CD I wanted to listen to on the office-provided portable CD player and headphones—I chose “Put Out Or Get Out” by Fabulous Disaster. They gave me laughing gas and local anesthetic; I could feel all the pressure and the scraping and the clanking but none of the pain. My most vivid memory from the whole ordeal is watching the surgeon’s hands come out of my mouth, his latex gloves splattered with blood, my blood—and laugh, laugh, laughing about it. He asked me what was so funny, and I tried to explain the absurdity of watching someone leave with your blood while you can’t feel anything, but there was shit in my mouth and my lips were numb and I was high on nitrous oxide, so I don’t think I translated it successfully into words.

The tooth came down; the braces came off again eventually. But, decades later, more than half my life so far, when the barometric pressure’s too high or the winter temperature is low enough, I feel a pinch in the empty space where that tooth once was, an ache that still hurts so many years later, in a mask that has seen so much and changed so much since then.

The body holds onto such strange, specific things.