Black Ice
It has been three weeks since I looked in my eyes. I don’t know how I am doing.
What I do know right now:
I know that ICE surged into my state in January.
I know that I have been trying to organize my white friends into a resourced subgroup of community action, which is or is not working, I can’t tell, because a couple of them keep sporadically messaging the group thread about events or resources they’ve learned about in the wild, after I had already shared the same information in the collective action spreadsheet. But they don’t usually do that, raise awareness about political events. So, maybe this visual display of them organizing their own thoughts is a sign that something is starting to click, even if they are doing work they don’t need to do, like promoting what I already promoted to them, because I was trying to make showing up at events easier for them to do, which they partly didn’t, but partially did.
I know that I haven’t seen one cardinal all winter. Not one. It’s like a clear night sky draped in a blankness of stars. A dream that started as a dream, but has shifted silently into subtle nightmare notes though the slowly increasing volume of what isn’t there, but should be. Goonies skeleton piano dissonance chords play in my awareness every time I am outside long enough to notice that I am not detecting them. No rush of red darting between hedges, no dash of bright against a slip of shadow on the snow, no one seeking seed from the brittle wildflower stalks popping out from the snowbanks insulating my driveway.
I know that I got a short haircut at some point during January, but I am not sure when. I think I made the decision because it was the easiest decision to make at the time, but for no other reason that I can remember. I am realizing this only just now, in real time, because I haven’t spent any time with the idea of it, or looking at it, or really caring about it. I can’t believe I am even writing about it, but truly, right now, it is like I am waking from amnesia, and I am feeling my head, and I am wondering where a lot of my hair went. Strange. But it also doesn’t feel strange. And I also don’t care, but I do care that I don’t care about it. That feels right, whether by my age or as a product of this very moment in time, or a product of my concussion, and I am glad to notice that, and to feel that, that there is something that I do not care about, and that it is this.
I know that on day one of the ICE surge, while I was on school watch, I slipped on black ice, and fell from my vertical place in the lower sky to a horizontal place on the pavement, the lowest part of the sky, faster than I could even react, so my body didn’t brace, which made my neck bounce my head off of a walkway. My head was a knee slap to a really bad cosmic joke.
A flush of blood gushed from my head, a blush of life spilling on the untouched, unsalted ice, hidden under snow, that made me say in dazed sincerity: “Oh wow, is this my blood?”
I stood up with a serene awareness that I might pass out, but was ok with it, because passing out would make sense in this situation. Which felt strange to think, but not strange to understand. And this reminds me of how I felt moments ago, finally registering the strange of the haircut that for weeks has mostly gone unnoticed by me, that I don’t really care about. And it is funny when you realize that how you felt about a haircut is how you felt about the moment of realizing that you would have been ok with the idea of passing out, because it actually was your blood on your hand from touching your gashed head. The calm of neutrality from the potential of a reasonable, unfightable effect from an event that has already passed.
A neighbor who is only a neighbor because she lives in my neighborhood, but not someone who lives closer than that, like a street neighbor, who is also someone I used to work with and hope to again someday, who is also someone I know from my younger life in this small city, but I do not know her closer than that at this older age, in a city that feels bigger now, who I had been randomly reunited with for this school watch, was with me.
Her kids go to this particular school, but mine don’t, so she thought to bring me inside, which I truly don’t think I would have thought of if I were alone. I was very kindly and gently treated by a school nurse for the first time in 30 years. My memory’s view of her and the principal in those moments is a very fishbowl perspective, like a 90’s grunge album cover, them gently leaning into my stranger’s face, with such control and concern and calm, and doing it because it was unspoken that they did not want me to know they were a little frightened for me, while I giggled nervously, feeling like I was taking up too much space in a crowded room, but it was only the four of us there because I was bleeding from my skull.
The nurse recommended stitches because blood was pouring, and a concussion check because maybe I kept giggling, so my partner came to get me and I was then taken to the ER, where a man who was not calm like the school nurse was calm, but steady in his uncaring and lack of concern, couldn’t hear me well, and kept saying he couldn’t see the sutures, as my thin eyebrow skin was pulled by him while following a disposable needle, that was like a wiry bird in my periphery, as his hands were trembling and perched upon my cheek, wielding more disposable metal tools that came out of a vacuum sealed plastic package, which before we left, he offered to my partner, tools still wet with saline, just in case, he said, my partner wanted to remove my sutures in 7-10 days. He didn’t. But we took the tools anyway, because with health care in America as it is, it felt like a doggy bag from a really expensive meal. The desirability of the leftovers was low, but we’d paid so much for the food, and maybe we’d need the leftovers in a pinch. They might be good to have so we don’t go hungry, I said to him. So we took them.
This man who is really just a doctor and this doctor who is really just an old, old man who is probably also stuck in a shitty American system like the rest of us, and that is why he still needs to work, only thought an x-ray of my neck was a good idea after I said, “it seems like I might need an x-ray for my neck, since my head bounced so hard?” And he said, “Oh, sure. I can put that order in for you.”
Before the stitches, but after the initial exam, he left me bleeding for 15 minutes with nothing to soak it up. My partner had to keep going to get rectangle bathroom brown paper towels. The kind that smell like old warm worn, but are cold and stiff and scratchy.
Doctor ended up only knotting 3 of the four stitches, but I don’t think that he knew that, because as he had said me, he couldn’t really see what he was doing, and it would be a weird medical and aesthetic choice to make otherwise, unless he could tell I am a hardscrabble gal, and could hold a lurching face scar with conviction and pride, and thought I’d secretly be thankful someday.
I could see the loose suture in my periphery for days, like the needle he’d used, but not like a cardinal. Flappy suture poked through the ambered scab of varying thickness, like the bee balm skeletons poking through the lopsided and crusted snow banks lining my driveway. The ones that the cardinals don’t come for anymore.
And now as I look in the mirror at the tubular hot pink scar just past my eyes, which now also look like they, too, are bleeding, but it is just the red alert awareness of a concussion-type level of internal asking of myself, without having the actual words in my brain, just the feeling of the numb but wounded wondering in my heart, of who am I in this mess.
In the reflection, I also see icicles reflected from the window behind me, growing as they melt and thaw and melt and thaw, and I remember that no amount of melting ever means winter is over, or that the ice will not return. As long as there is water, as long as it flows fluid, back and forth between source and source, and it can afford to rest frozen, hidden and camouflaged by this current winter climate, and that ice will always be a threat, whether or not the world looks right side up or totally, painfully sideways.
