Green

“It looks like alien blood.” His attempt to lighten the situation with humor lacked tact, but I forced a smile through the wet monsoon raining from my eyes and blurring my face. 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.

...

I’d never dreamed I’d see the inside of an ambulance. But then again I’d never dreamed I’d stick a knife clean through my right ring finger either.

I could blame my sister for her vague telephone explanation: “Just hit the pit with a knife and pull it out. That’s how the chef’s do it. It’s so easy.” If only she could’ve diagrammed the process for me. I guess telephones aren’t so conducive to visual aids though. I could blame the avocado for being too soft, too slippery, too perfectly ripe in my grasp. How could I blame something so delicious though? I should blame myself. Too rushed, too rash, too trusting in the outcome of this easy new method. I suppose I had it coming.

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.

Pat ran through my mind, as he had for the few months since we’d last spoken. Penetrating my thoughts and sanity with his absence. My time with him had been a blinding whirlwind that had swept me up higher than I’d ever been and dropped me from that height before I’d even known what was happening. To this day, I cringe a bit when Kris Kristofferson’s “The Taker” comes onto my shuffle playlist. It’s like he wrote the damn song about Pat. If I’m driving alone, I always hit Next.

From the very beginning Pat Driscoll had been too good to be true, but in a good way I’d thought. We’d started by running together. And he ran fast. I’m a pretty strong runner, but he was all muscle and energy and no chill. After our first run together my arms went numb with the effort of keeping up with him. But it thrilled me. The speed, the challenge, the shared passion for racing.

The running turned into texting and hanging out and texting more. He was just so easy to talk to, genuinely interested in learning everything about me, texting from his waking moment until he fell asleep. I hadn’t ever liked texting that much before, but he had me reaching for my phone like some kind of chronic disease impelled my hand. I’m disgusted thinking of it now.

Whatever I liked, he loved.

I said I liked books.

“I read all the time.” Swoon.

I liked Fitzgerald.

“Gatsby was my favorite in high school.” Swoon more.

I liked writing.

“O yeah, I write poetry pretty often.” I’m dying.

I listened to Bruce.

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

I cooked sweet potatoes nearly every day.

“I make these awesome cinnamon sweet potato fries. I’ll make them for you.” Oh man.

He’d sometimes include the emoji of a monkey holding both hands over his face when he texted something funny. Looking at the monkey now, I honestly can’t tell if the poor thing is laughing, crying or just hiding.

And when he revealed that he had a Superman S tattooed on his chest, I started texting “goodnight, Superman” instead of his Christian name, a cute little joke in our shamelessly sugar-dripping late night texts. Who the heck was that girl? Someone should have taken her phone away.

And not that I was a shallow in my attraction. But he was hot. 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. It was terrifying how attractive he was. It wasn’t fair. He was one of those types of good-looking that I’d only thought I would admire from afar and never have that attraction reciprocated. But about a month into our undefined relationship, the couch went out from under me when we finally made out and he admitted that he’d wanted to do that since the first time he’d seen me.

There’s no way this is real, I thought on my drive home from his place that night.

His name flashed on my phone screen with a text: “Miss you already. [monkey face]”

I guess it’s real.

The texts were real, the kisses were real, and the passion was real.

I hadn’t thought I would feel something like this about anyone since the college boyfriend who’d broken my heart, but I really felt something with Pat. 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 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.

It all just happened so fast.

One night I was in his arms, and the next day I found out the truth from a guy friend who knew him and wanted me to know too. Pat entered things fast and with confidence. His running, his relationships, his loving, his lying.

While he was seeing me, he had two other girlfriends, one of whom he’d knocked up in college. He was the father of a two-year old son, whose existence was starkly absent from Pat’s home. No pictures on the walls or in frames in his room. Instead, his bedroom served 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.

I learned that 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.

Pat gave so much attention (via text mostly albeit) that it seemed impossible to me that he could have had any other girl in his life, let alone a son. I had known him to live an active and social lifestyle, but I came to learn that when he’d said he was off golfing or gone for a weekend with the boys...well, you get the story.

When I heard the truth, my brain went hot. I’m not a person to get angry, really ever, but I slipped into anger as easily as a knife through avocado meat.

And he ghosted. Never responded to the last text I sent, never lit up my screen with a single text message banner from that day on, never reached out, never explained, never apologized. Maybe he was ashamed or didn’t know what to say. More likely he just didn’t care.

And as much as I said I didn’t care either and said I hated him, I wanted him to care.

The pain of anger mixed with abandonment attacked me in a way unlike normal grievances. I’d lost both friendship and passion at once without any say in whether I wanted them gone or not.

We’d never taken any pictures together, so aside from my text stream of messages in their green and blue bubbles, there was no concrete evidence that we had even been involved. It was like we’d never existed in each other’s lives, and it could have been easy to accept that reality save for the unfaltering pain inside me.

I should’ve seen that he seemed too good, too fast, too charming, but 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.

He drove me mad, replacing his suffocating presence with a new blaring absence. I questioned my own judgment, wondering if we had been on the same page, if I had thought it was something it wasn’t, if he’d ever cared, if it had even happened. Damn it. Of course it had happened.

Gatsby came to mind. I wondered if he’d 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 thought of 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. He never knew of the green light Gatsby watched in his nightly vigil and the hope it was supposed to be. Empty hope, that’s all it was.

But I wanted him to. I wanted him to hear me, to see me, to say something to me. I cringed at his power over me, and the fact that I should hate him and want to egg his Chevy instead of have a conversation with him. He’d reduced me to less than a person in his mind and had dumped me as carelessly as trashing a bagel he’d changed his mind about. I had no agency in the matter. That killed me.

...

Alone in my kitchen, I went through the motions of dinner prep. Cutting a cucumber into slices, cradling an avocado half in my palm without real awareness of my motions. 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.

The pain didn’t come right away. Disbelief dumbed me for about a minute before I realized what I’d done. I tried to pull it out to take it back, but it wouldn’t budge and I hadn’t the strength to pull harder.

When the hurt came, it blinded me.

I sat on a stretcher, the avocado impaled like a green harpooned whale on my hand, as an ambulance sped me through the streets of Springfield. The paramedic, who held my hand immobile, tried to lighten the mood with his alien blood joke or by commenting that I was the fourth food-cutting injury he’d seen that year. (Bagels and cantaloupe had been the other culprits.) It felt like the avocado was the perpetrator in my attack, but I had been 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 next four hours brought the most physical pain I’ve ever endured. It might not have been that bad, but the knife was right on my nerve, and Dr. Parikh was hesitant to remove the knife without knowing exactly how much damage the movement might cause.

So I waited, alone for the first couple hours, knife in 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.

Dr. Parikh had to be called in from home, so he got there after I’d been there about 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.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. I’m very good at that.”

He did his best to get a good scan of my hand without moving the knife and departed to evaluate the results. When my roommates arrived they tried to distract me, and we all agreed that this was the worst part. Once the knife was out, I’d be okay.

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 placebo pills, 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. The knife was no longer in my hand, but the pain it had caused was undeniable and maintained a terrifying hold over my emotions and thoughts.

Dr. Parikh had scheduled me to come in for surgery to repair any damage to the nerve about a week after the incident. I was a nervous wreck throughout the preparation and could barely articulate words. My sister had come with me, and she handled the talking parts. I handled the panicking parts.

Before I received anesthesia, Dr. Parikh explained to me what would happen.

“The knife could have severed your nerve pretty badly, but I won’t know until I open it up. If it’s bad, you may not recover complete control of your finger for another year. You’ll need physical therapy if that’s the case.”

I’d been through therapy once before, and I didn’t want the pain and patience that demanded.

“It may not be that bad though. Like I said, I won’t know until I look inside there.”

What if I lost my finger? What if the anesthesia didn’t work? What if my nerve was beyond repair?

He soothed my questions away. When it was time, I counted myself into oblivion on the operating table.

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. I once wrote a poem comparing Time to a slow working surgeon, working without urgency, letting pain happen, but slowly and surely sewing up the places of pain with stitches and letting scars take the place of wounds.

I woke up in recovery with my sister beside me. Dr. Parikh entered with a couple black and white pictures.

“You’re very lucky,” he smiled. “The blade only nicked your nerve, causing a lot of pain but only the smallest amount of physical damage. You’ll be back to normal in a couple months.”

…

I guess Pat just nicked me on a heart nerve. It was white hot pain in the moment, but the injury could have been so much worse. I’ve come to see what went wrong and how I compromised myself in ways I never should have. In the moment, it’s hard to see that clearly though. Hindsight is always sharper than insight.

I still feel pangs of anxiety when I think I see him at Starbucks or running down the street. One time I drove by him as he was running and had a minor panic attack at the wheel. I never had the chance to confront him after he hurt me, and that gnaws at me.

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 on that finger 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 changed.

I still get these unsettling shudders too. When I visualize a touch I didn’t want. When I envision knives cutting through my hands accidentally. My whole body convulses without my anticipation or control in a momentary, jolting shiver. They happen often. When a memory, image or touch surfaces a past pain. I don’t know if and when they’ll ever cease, but they don’t let me forget. Perhaps that’s why I still don’t trust men. Not completely. I still get the shudders and the incapacitating fear that they’ll stab me on the nerve.