Green

“It looks like alien blood.”

He was right. It didn’t look like anything that human veins could emit. My right hand, held firmly and unmoving in his grasp, was wrapped in gauze, oozing vibrant stains of red and green onto the white. Beneath the gauze a strange appendage stuck up straight like a sixth finger. I almost couldn’t believe that thing was my hand, but the pang of lightning burning from my finger up the inside of my arm was too real for it not to be.

How did I get here? Too rushed, too rash, too trusting in something I thought I knew.

...

The truth was I hadn’t been thinking. At least not of the avocado. I’d been wallowing in the pits of my mind again as I sliced the fruit in half and prepared to pit it, going through the motions while my mind moved in another world in which Pat Driscoll ruled all. He penetrated my thoughts and sanity with his absence. The absence of his body beside mine as we raced through the trails of the state park by his house. The absence of his omnipresent text banners heralding another sugar-dripping message. The absence of his words professing their love for each and every one of my likes.

I said I liked books.

“I read all the time.”

I liked Fitzgerald.

“Gatsby was my favorite in high school.”

I listened to Bruce.

“I’ve seen him in concert five times.”.

In my mind, I watched him tyrannize my thoughts. Tall with prominent dark brows, striking green eyes, tanned skin and well defined calves and biceps. When he smiled, there was a boyishly devilish charm to it that terrified me in its attractive lure.

I’d never dreamed a guy like him would ever reciprocate my attraction, but he made it all seem so real. The texts were real, the kisses were real, and the passion was real.

The intense desire to be with him and be close to him, as close as possible. To feel his hands on me, his mouth on mine, and still not be close enough. I hadn’t realized the limits of the body until I was in his grasp, wanting to be closer but realizing that the closest we would ever get was the space that two human bodies can ever allow their souls to be. We were only as close as skin could say.

And the touch of his hot skin on mine was as real as anything. But no more real than the truth that loomed a little later into my life and stayed there longer than he did.

The truth came from the mouth of an acquainted informant who gave me the names of his two other girlfriends and two-year old son, whose existence had been starkly absent from Pat’s home and my knowledge. There had been no signs. His bedroom lacked photos, instead serving as a shrine for his physical exploits. He displayed the medals he’d earned from various full and half marathons on a special board facing his bed, so that every girl he brought home could see them but wouldn’t know that she, that we, were each just another of those medals in his mind.

He lied pathologically, and his own mother had long ago accepted that her son had been diagnosed as a sociopath. Mrs. Driscoll attended regular counseling for a time to find ways to live with her son and love him for who he was.

The truth cut into me, ripped my breath from my body and burned my insides with anger.

I never saw him clearly until I stopped seeing him. He was the type of guy who travelled in the passing lane in his teal Chevy Silverado, a huge truck the size of his ego. His radio blared the voices of pop stars whose lyrics stay comfortably in the level of young love, cheap love, lost love, all excited by music that got him bopping his dopey head like a Barbie. A beautiful Barbie. Damn it.

Gatsby entered my mind. I wondered if Pat had been lying when he’d reciprocated my love for Fitzgerald’s work. I thought of the futility of that fleeting sense of long-awaited wish fulfilment when Gatsby finally had Daisy in his life as more than the distant blinking green light from her dock across the bay. I thought of Nick’s line at the end of the novel after Gatsby’s been shot and the Buchanans don’t even come to his funeral.

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I once considered sending Pat that excerpt, ripping out the page from one of my many copies, circling the words and placing it on the windshield of his stupid Chevy.

But then I wasn’t even sure if he’d ever read a word of Gatsby in the first place.

The words would probably be lost on him if he even did read them. There was nothing I could do to make him hear me, see me, speak to me as a person. In his mind, I could easily have been a bagel he’d changed his mind about and trashed without care.

...

My eyes looked to where I cradled an avocado half in my palm, but my mind just saw Pat baring his white sneer in amusement. My left hand pulled back and then struck full force to get the pit, but I didn’t anticipate the slipperiness of the dark avocado heart that deflected my knife tip and let it slide right through the soft, green flesh, the unyielding black skin and straight through my finger, jutting out the other side, sticking on bone and resting right on a nerve.

Disbelief stopped time and me for a moment. When the hurt came, it blinded me.

In the ambulance I sat on a stretcher, the avocado impaled like a green harpooned whale on my hand, as if the cursed fruit was the victim in this attack. It felt like the avocado was the offender, but I had been the one holding the knife.

I’d just expected something different from the avocado. I loved avocados. I trusted that it would let my knife enter it and possess the pit so I’d have access to the velvety flesh waiting for my teeth to sink into it, my tongue to taste it. I certainly didn’t expect it to brush the tip aside and let me stab myself in my blinded haste.

The paramedic’s tactless attempt to lighten the mood with his alien blood joke didn’t lighten the pain that remained unfalteringly acute and raw for the next four hours. At the hospital, the doctor had to be called in from home; so I waited. Knife directly on my nerve sticking through my hand, reminding me of my blunder, my whole arm throbbing as the pain travelled up my nerve like fire. The drugs they’d given me were doing a pathetic job being any sort of help.

When Dr. Parikh arrived, I had been there almost an hour. I must have been well hydrated, since there was still a ridiculous amount of water seeping from my eyes. He walked in smoothly, unphased by the monstrosity of tears, blood, and avocado flesh in front of him. He spoke in a strong Indian accent with a collected, reassuring tone.

“Were you so unsuccessful at cutting your finger off that you had to come in?”

It can be hard to appreciate humor when there’s a knife in your body, but that line alleviated the pain momentarily.

He hesitated to remove the knife without knowing exactly how much damage the movement might cause. He did his best to get a good scan of my hand without moving the knife and departed to evaluate the results. I thought the waiting would be the hardest part.

Dr. Parikh finally returned, said that X-ray scans hadn’t been clear enough to tell just how much the knife had damaged my nerve, so he decided not to wait any longer to pull it out.

I wanted to hate him so badly in that moment, this man who was about to release me from my pain. I’d been sitting here with a knife penetrating my finger for four plus hours with only a couple useless pain pills in my system that may have well as been placebos, and he had finally come to the conclusion that his time-consuming scans had been inconclusive. The four hours of hell had been for naught.

He numbed my hand and pulled it out.

It turned out that the time with the knife in my finger wasn’t the worst part at all. It was just the start.

The next week brought a blur of drugged days, insomnia, severe anxiety and horrific flashbacks that left me in tears out of my control to quell.

I felt like a stranger in my own body.

A week later, Dr. Parikh told me he wouldn’t know how damaged my nerve was until we were in surgery. I put my faith in his hands and counted myself into the oblivion of the anesthesia, unsure of what I would awake to.

I wondered if Dr. Parikh could fix everything broken in me with his tanned, strong fingers and quiet confidence. The things inside me that even a surgeon’s tools can’t cut into and see.…

Hindsight is always sharper than insight. Always sharper than dull kitchen knives.

The white hot pain has subsided, but I have scars, visible and invisible that don’t let me forget. Pangs of anxiety when I think I see Pat. Uncontrollable shudders when the thought of an unwanted touch or a knife in my hand surfaces unbidden in my mind. The incapacitating fear that each new man in my life will stab me on the nerve.

My right hand ring finger has a scar like the one on Harry Potter’s forehead, and when my hands get cold that finger always goes white and numb. I can’t wear rings anymore. A jagged lightning bolt of white marks the place where scar tissue has enlarged the base segment.

It reminds me of my past carelessness, and it reminds me that I’m healed, but scarred.