year

i. I am inside a small room and have been asked to sit on the side of the bed. Two or three people tap their fingers up and down my back like seagulls on grass. There is sudden coldness from a stethoscope. An efficient and rehearsed apology. I giggle. I actually giggle, coquettish in my nervousness. The room is suddenly still, I think, though the rattling of metallic equipment continues somewhere behind me. Kathy, the no nonsense mother of a friend, comes through swinging doors in navy scrubs. Her hair is short. She touches my hand. I smile. My face is heavy as wet sheets. “This is my friend” she tells a nurse, her accent peppered with beats of her Scottishness. She's the woman you'd have wanted with you during the Blitz, I have always thought. A no muss, no fuss, get the job done sort of a woman, but who would still wrap her arms around your own and sing lullabies over the sounds of bombs falling outside. I want her to sing to me now.
I am clicking my fingers in my lap but the pads of my hands are clammy and cold and they only make a weighted scuff sound that drops to the floor like a stone.
A round nurse with a ponytail puts her hand on my shoulder, and the intimacy of it makes my cheeks flush. She explains what will happen next, but I have had operations before. The part that the patient plays is most often the same; the character that drives the plot forward, the reason everyone is gathered around the table. I don’t hear what she says.
The same nurse wipes my hand with a cold, stinging cloth and pulls a needle from a paper bag.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I say,
“I’m not very brave.” I say.
“You’re doing fine.” She says.
She smiles and then I smile. The room becomes foggy. I am crying and I am trying not to cry.
I am doing fine, I tell myself.
I am flat now, with a cushion beneath my legs. My glasses are on a tray that Kathy has put some place else, and the man in front of my face is a shining puzzle of pink shapes.
“You’ll be asleep soon” he is saying, as my body fills from bottom to top with an ice cold stillness.

ii. It is the afternoon. I am back on the ward and my parents are sitting next to my bed. I eat a potato that is microwave warm and foamy in my mouth.

It wasn’t all that hard in the end, I catch myself thinking. Tomorrow I will be home. Mum will make me sandwiches. I will turn on movies in the afternoon that I will sleep through unapologetically. I am a patient, I catch myself thinking. I have to rest.
Debbie and Sheridan come armed with magazines and I laugh now about how nervous I had been in those minutes before, as though I am describing a TV show. It is partly an act now, already just a story I am telling. I show them all how well my new hip works, walking aided by crutches to the toilet next to my room. I can hear them clapping. I stand in the toilet but I can’t go, a lingering effect of the anaesthetic that won’t loosen its grip until late into the night. I walk slowly back. I sit on my bed. I am going to be sick. Debbie holds back my hair and hums “Oh sweetheart” near to my sticky face. I spit into the bowl she is holding under my chin.

iii. January. Three months have passed and I am back at the hospital. I have a condition I am told. My bones are growing extra bone, they say, the space between my joints slowly becoming smaller until there will be no space left at all.

“It explains why you’ve had to have your hip replaced at such a young age.” They say. They are matter of fact, the way doctors often are, pointing the tip of their pen at my x-ray as though they are telling the weather.
"Yes." I say.
It is funny, I suppose, that I have spent my life petrified of death, and now can feel my body aging minute by minute as it whimpers towards a finale. My body is speaking my mind, I catch myself thinking, recalling the title of a book I had skimmed through once. I have spent so much time being frightened that now my body is an ancient ruin. Fear has scratched and scratched at my insides like flint onto a wall, until I have become what I had always been scared of; I am broken.

iv. They give me a pill that I am to take every day. It is a buffer, I guess. A triangular, green cushion between me and the constant ache that is by now as familiar as family.

I am uneasy in this body. It is an ill-fitting suit jacket, a long car journey, a city street in summer. I am awkward corners that jut and fold and creek in the night time.
The pain I had long ago surrendered to is no longer asomatous. I can see it now. Him. He, a constant companion I am almost reticent to let go of. I have grown uncomfortably comfortable in his company, weaving the two of us so tightly together I'm convinced I cannot exist aside from him.
I take the pills anyway. Days turn over into weeks and that familiar, unending ache becomes a sporadic beat, every now and again ba-booming a broken circuit through my middle. At once I fall into light, balmy summer evenings, distracted by candlelit picnics between busy roads and breath stealing laughter. Amidst this dizzying rebirth, I am distracted by the memory of myself, before him, fuzzing back into focus like a developing photograph.