waiting rooms
The hardest thing, it turns out, is not to find a lesson. To tell myself: a broken bone isn't a sign, but a fact. A cyst bloomed in my pinky and it grew slowly, imperceptibly, until it was big enough to be a problem. I might never have noticed it if I hadn't taken up hitting things recreationally. But I did. And now it's a thing that's happening, and I'm trying very hard not to ask why.
I went to see a surgeon this morning who said, good news, the break is healed. Bad news, the cyst isn't. So in six weeks he'll go in-- he used a ballpoint pent to mark exactly where-- and scoop it out. The space where fluid used to be will get filled in with bone from a dead person's body. ("Don't worry, it's gone through a whole process, it's clean.") Eventually, that will fuse with my bone, and in about six months it will be like none of this ever happened.
Kind of. Not really.
I'm very frustrated today. I asked the surgeon if I could go back to yoga and he said "We-ell, the break is healed, but is the bone any stronger than it was before? No." Eventually he allowed that I could, as long as I made sure to keep my weight towards the thumb and index finger when I'm on my hands, which is what teachers want you to do anyway. I didn't tell him: "you're lucky I'm not pestering you about getting back on a heavy bag," but I thought it. If you ever want to see a hand surgeon blanch, tell them how much you love boxing.
It's six weeks until I can get on his schedule for the surgery. Six weeks, and then two weeks in a cast, and then a few months of physical therapy. It will be fine. I just did it, a month without much use of that finger, and it was annoying, but I managed.
It's just so fucking disheartening, to know that I'm going to have to start healing all over again. It's so hard not to look at this and look up at the sky and say, what, you think I didn't learn how to relax enough the first time around??? Like anyone cares. The lesson is: there is no lesson. The lesson is: get comfortable with the idea that there is no lesson. Just pain, and then its absence. Time passing, things changing. Nothing, not even your own body, is ever going to hold still.
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Elsewhere this week: I'm in The Paris Review Daily, talking The Women Writers You've Been Overlooking, and why if you loved Lady Bird, you owe it to yourself to read some YA.
From the archives: last time I was in TPR it was in 2011, writing about Joan Didion and California. This piece has extreme sentimental value to me, since it's the first thing that made me think seriously that I could like, be a writer, someday, maybe.
(Also, speaking of young adult novels, please don't read today's NYT piece about YA, as it is wrong on basically every possible level.)