One day a woman that I love is pressed against my side on a very old couch that we have treated twice for bedbugs and she says, quietly, “healing takes too long.”
And she is right, though I won’t realize it for several more years. My experiences of injury and healing are limited to minor and medium physical ailments. I have sprained a wrist, had my wisdom teeth out, run jagged scars across an arm by falling out of a tree and onto concrete. Healing in this sense can be long, but has a timeline, has a nurse who will lift a bandage and say, oh just about another week now.
I have not yet begun to work through the spiritual scars that I bear, but she and I bonded first over having left restrictive religions and the ways they can etch constraint into your soul. So when she says, healing takes too long, I do not realize that she means, I am looking for a shortcut.
We break up some weeks later but stay in touch for a few more years; she moves to New York and I will not disentangle myself from the life I’ve painstakingly built and am already paying steep costs for.
I see her once more, some two years after the breakup, a year into her stint in Brooklyn. She is frighteningly skinny, effervescently cool, angular in ways that make me sure I will break her if I breathe on her. We meet, she drinks her dinner, and when she drags me to the bathroom I am filled with reminiscences of past ardor, moments in which we could not separate, but she is offering a key bump, and my hands on her waist are grasping raw hips, sharp skin, old grief.