V

Dearest Meadow,

I contort the face in the mirror, franticly fumbling for recognition. Sediment of fervently forced digastric muscle stains lips and cheeks. I pull and tug, votive offerings of violent velvet vasodilation. I brush, bleeding and receding, yet still he lies steeping between tongue and teeth. Pull, tug, and brush. Repetition is hollow. Disection is imminent. Sever the jaw. Surgical sanitation. Remodel the bones, allow purity to proliferate—a ritualistic, reconstructive, exoneration.

I pry cortical bone from trabecular, tear muscle and ligament. Sever every fibre that tethers me to unfamiliarity. Carve through the sinews of his mistakes. Split, snap, and saw, until, somewhere, below slow leaking blood vessels and cellular influx, I am immaculate. Wash me in saline. Sanctify my bones with carbon and spider silk. Promise protection from allostatic pressure. Wrap me in gauze. Vow that I will never break again.

Edema and contusion envelop me, offering refuge from my reflection. I hope I am healing; I can’t tell anymore. Ache is spreading through muscle and marrow, is this fusion or fracture? Lingering in uncertainty, torn between fear and faith, I pray these are growing pains. I vacillate, until somewhere under cartilaginous callus, I can sense it, there is a new homeostatic rhythm quietly composing. A subtle beating choir of pulse and fire. It reverberates with the promise of ossification, a body restructured, a reflection reborn. Granulation tissue blooms over scars, capillaries weave gold through epithelial, coaxing metamorphosis from the very atoms that bind me.

Always yours,

Dorothea