So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are.
I’m sorry. I know I should have said that to you before the anesthesiologist put you under and the surgeon opened up your skull. But now the surgeon is staring at the quivering quill in my hand, waiting for me to finish editing so he can put this poem back inside of you.
I’m pretty sure the surgeon is one of those judgmental assholes who thinks it’s disrespectful to revise a life poem without the consent of the original authors. After you went under, he asked me twice why your parents weren’t in the operating room and both times gave me this lemon-sucking pucker face when I dodged the question.
My palm is wet and red and sticky. The surgeon used this tiny silver vacuum on the scroll after he pulled it out of your frontal lobe but that only got most of the blood, and, of course, now my hand’s cramping. I’m not used to writing with a quill and that hole just looks wrong, a one-inch hole is too big to put in a person’s skull, it looks like a hungry mouth but you should only have one mouth, and it’s not supposed to be at the back of your head.
Okay, deep breaths, looking away from your gray matter. I’m sorry. I wish that your parents were less horrible. Plan A isn’t an option; I can’t use the edits you spent months on because the poem they gave us did not have a single fucking word in common with the scroll inside your brain. I can still barely believe they demanded payment for a copy of your original life poem because it was their intellectual property so we had to add paying off your asshole parents as a line item in the surgery fundraiser. But even after we paid them off, they lied, or maybe they misremembered what they wrote, but I’m sure they lied.
But I have the original now, it’s stuck to my thumb with your blood. I know the words. I could hand it back to the surgeon without changing anything and he could close you up and then you could revise it yourself. But we’d need another fundraiser and we barely got enough money last time. And the doctors said it would be at least a year of recovery before they could open up your skull again and you . . . you said you couldn’t last that long.
So we’re at plan B where I have to figure out how to revise you without rewriting you from scratch and completely nuking your personality, under time pressure, without looking at or thinking about the hole in your skull, which is totally, totally fine, not a problem at all. It’s easy, trivial really, just have to not think about the things I shouldn’t think about. For example, I definitely shouldn’t think about that paper I found online about botched life poem revisions that goes into way too much detail about how a six-month coma might be a better outcome than a psychotic break and Jesus Christ how did I let you talk me into this.
The judgy surgeon is waving his watch at me, fuck fuck fuck.
Okay, I lied earlier, it’s not that we aren’t far enough in our relationship. It’s that I love you, I love you as you are. You always said that the poem was like a nail slowly driving into you, splintering you into a thousand pieces, but I love every piece of you, even if some of them have sharp edges. And I’m . . . I’m afraid. I’m not afraid of breaking you further—I mean, I am, I’m fucking terrified of that. But I’m even more terrified that if I “fix” you . . . that if I fix you, you’ll be a different, better person and that a better version of you won’t need me anymore. And that’s horrible. I’m horrible and selfish and I’m broken too but I won’t be like them. I won’t shape you for me, I’ll shape you for you.
And even . . . even if you leave me after this, I will always love you.
swift of foot, bold and strongswift of heart, bold with song
lacking only direction, desiring naught but lovequesting for direction, brimming full with love
sheltered by family, country, Godarmored by friendship, family found, and god
a testament to perfection, a loyal, noble sona testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above
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