Blue Child

Pain. Some people say they enjoy it, some even pay for it. Save up their hard earned dollars to defy their primitive instincts for self-preservation, as if to remind themselves of the expiry date on their flesh, the precariousness of their body. It’s an arousal unlike anything else, or so they say. They like it, crave it. I couldn’t understand it that way.

I woke up one day with a fat bruise on the flat of my shin. It stung tenderly, stood up against my skin, babbling, about to hatch from underneath. I thought nothing of it at first, bothered only by surprise and by my own curiosity. It swelled like an apple, but I assumed that was it. It would go away and heal over, my shin would go back to its unblemished state as just another unremarkable part of me. I would be fine. By the end of the week, I barely had a shin anymore. It had spread past my knee, reaching toward my hip like eutrophication. Even with the broad spectrum of modern medical progress on my side, I was doomed from the start. I was growing blue, bottom to top, rapidly.

When they told me I had two weeks to live I was already coming to terms with my own death. They said it would be painful, that I should expect a hard landing. They gave up on me too easily, their bewilderment a shadow on an ego trained to omnipotence. Hadn’t I more to give? My sisters came to watch with little crystals in their eyes. The pain they felt was different, far beyond physical. They turned away from me to spare themselves. I was in hospice by the end of the day, doped up on dilaudid to the neck. But I felt it creep through the numbness: pain. An edge scraping off periosteum.

As you start to die, you reach for the ceiling, for something above you, maybe for your own soul as it begins to ascend. I had just a few days left and I was reaching with deep blue arms towards the deep blue sky. I was alone in the room at times. Mechanical sounds interrupting my quiet meditation towards death. I understood why people avoided the hospice. There was a smell, a harassment. The nurses, they whispered stories of spirits, of patients looking up, talking to the empty corners of their rooms, hearing phantom spells. Some begging for more time, bargaining with whatever waited on the other side. My fingernails turned blue, and I mourned my cutting them with the jagged scissors in my room, leaving the strips between the fibers of my carpet. They were still there, lodged, left over for my mother to collect and cherish once I was gone. Maybe all that’s left of me, even the grotesque, will stay in a glass jar– stray hairs, fingernail shavings. Where would all my old bras go? What about my chair at the kitchen table?

I knew the exact day I would die. I never had a last good day. Not subtly, the nurses dialed up my dose through the line in my chest. There was no hope when the sedation grew heavier and heavier, holding me to my sheets. There was too much pain, too much wreckage on my body. What started on my shin had long erupted and split. And now the rest of me was splitting too. Like the werewolves in fables, I was breaking open, transforming into something else entirely. In spirit too. Any past joy had already crossed over, washed away by the blue. But, I knew. I knew it was almost over.

She came to me the day I died. Hellenic and ethereal. Hair long and healthy, skin purged. Voice soft. I cried jealous tears, asked her for a timeline. When? How long did I have to hold on for? Was I always meant for this? She said it was promised, that all the stories of fate were told true, there was no debating it.

“Are you her,” I asked: “Fate?”

“I am no such thing.”

She sent a red pang through me like a slice. I could see my reflection through her translucency and our differences were daunting, offensive.

“You’re me. You’re me, if I was…”

She confirmed it.

“This is what I could have had.”

The regret was unfound; I couldn’t regret what was out of my control. I had done nothing to warrant it. Had no sin to repent or clear.

“How dare you show up here” I spat. How much cruelty could I take? I was not a martyr to accept such suffering. Physical sacrifice has always been abhorrent to me, wasteful. I looked at her and I wanted to kill her. My entire future, taken from me, drowned in abyssal blue. She was a whole being, developed and nurtured. She had known life in a way I could only grasp at. I bet she had lovers. I bet she had untapped knowledge and a family. She said nothing in her defense, stood there in her blazing perfection, full of color and vibrancy, while I sunk further, reaching up into nothingness. She opened her pretty mouth:

“Is this what you wanted?”

I burned with capsicum tears. Teeth sharp in my mouth and tightly woven by bitterness.

“This is what I deserved.” And I let it go the second I said it.

She seemed sad and I sensed she knew she was just as buried as I was. A buried future specter, perhaps an unreachable, untouchable idol. She moved to me, placed herself on my cheek with her thumb at the corner of my pale lip.

“You’re so blue. I remember when you were born. Pink and squealing.” Her feathery touch landed like a blow. “What a blue, blue child you are now.”

I swallowed.

“Not for long,” I pleaded with my eyes, “Right?”

She shook her head yes, the atmosphere shifting around her to avoid flawing her essence.

“No, not for long.”

Pain. I don’t understand choosing or asking for it. To choose pain when you can stay holy to your body, touch it softly the way my ghost was touching me. Treat it like a miracle, like blown glass in your volatile hand. There is nothing arousing about pain.

“When they come to see you,” she said, “try to smile. Let them remember you that way.”

And I did, no matter how much effort it cost me.

I shed my blue skin with ease that day.