healing
: this word implies grievously difficult <=> a hard arc with shining edges <=> transports/lifts one out of.
or
a deep natural spring on wheels, a kind of propulsion bridge, which if you can situate yourself over it, refills your bloodstream or organs or what-have-you with right and proper liquefaction. Resplendence in a tube of ocu-goo, an I.V. an enema.
This is the resplendent lie that makes narratives of healing readable for both reader and narrator. That is to say, a necessary fiction, and thus partially (or sometimes almost wholly true for the individual depending on how the mind can or can not touch down on itself during the “healing’).
Undergirding that arc, the real-time truth, much more whole than partial in it’s particulate unfolding-standstill, is healing as
: a shuffling wait-check in-wait-check in. Doctor after 7 days--well, maybe corneal erosion will be more of a risk, considering the dry eye condition you mentioned; Dr. after 14 days—well, removal of the bandage contact lens must have stripped the new cells. we’ll put a new bandage in your eye; Dr. after 21 days—I think you continuing to use your glaucoma drops, which are harsh, was what has prevented you from healing. The phraseology here is much different than what was really said—the latter lacked any acknowledgment of miscommunication, insufficient forewarning, hastiness, or under anticipation of side complications on the part of the doctor. (Which, actually, is not to say this doctor did a bad job, but just that he would not even remotely implicate himself in the variable after-effects.)
a call-and-response, literally. As it involves family and friends, willing to sit on the other end of the phone for daily and weekly updates on the degree to which the corneal epithelium is whorling and/or the degree to which it has been ripped off, again, by its own fleshier twin, the eyelid. The listener there for the parsing of the eyeball’s quadrants and to which degree these areas might be dry vs. dangerously dry, the exactitude of achey, jabby, stabbing or burning as it applies to these quadrants and speculation on how variations of each sensation may or may not indicate an incremental improvement. Trying to make the narrative as interesting and lively for the listeners as possible because this is how she returns—and justifies—the grace that is extended to her in the listening. The speaker suffering herself as a boring person because the speaking out of all this is a form of the getting there. As in, better.
Trying to visualize a healthy aqueous layer for my eye so that it can once again incubate a clear skin, I am much in mind of founts. (To be “in mind” <=> with an eye that sticks when swiveled to the left or right.) Of the shaman who sidled up, not without genuine kindness, to Norma Cole and suggested she begin a practice a pouring water back and forth, from one glass to the next. He said that then she would be healed. presumably from her stroke. And while I understand what a farce and a presumption this is; a stream of water <=> the reversal of neural damage I do love the image and believe it could be of help. Not necessarily for Norma, but someone. Maybe me. The image of water; the color of nothing, Or just greywhite by definition, for definition maybe, through the kitchen window when the lights are turned off indoors and it is stop-time, convalescing-or-resting-in-the-house, afternoon. A getting nowhere, but a shuttling back and forth. The stream of water and the clear drinking glasses. Just a slight shining.
Of course, I have not tried this exercise myself, but I like believing that if I got around to it, it might, by transubstantiation, re-juice my eye. Similarly, I have not followed the exercise Bhanu Kpail suggested to me in a Starbucks, going on more than 2 years ago—to lie down on my floor and write myself up from my dirty baseboards (which I described to her as feeling trapped by because of what they come to mean for me about simple tasks at the parataxis of arthritic knees). Oooh, there, I feel better admitting I have yet to actually try that. But like the water-pouring, I imagine the baseboard-spooning all the time and it seems to have activated something It is something like an internalized somatic practice. One day, I will do it with my body and who knows what will happen. For now, what I actually do more often than anything is engage in verbal minutia of the eye-recovery over the phone with the friends and the family. For the silent-type who has to heal from something, all that describing and listening must seem like a frightful belaboring or hemming-in, but as mom would say, we’re ‘just talking”. As in, it marks the time. Keeps one whole in the moment even when one is purportedly reaching toward holos. A metronome in answer to illusory transport. A way to stay still in it without stopping.
