Religion Hawes

That rash blooming beneath my arms where the crutches made their cruel beds, pulsed- in time with something deeper. With becoming- becoming the itch, the suffering, the misery. Becoming the needle-prick sensation that overtook skin and thought and word. The burning took my body, it took the space beneath my eyes. The fire that only God Himself could have kindled, and Satan could stoke. That burn took my body for itself. It took what I knew and turned it to smoke, to dust. All I knew to be true about myself dissipated into uncertainty. I was no longer a girl, a daughter, or even a being, but a pincushion. My Mama’s favorite, round as a stomach full of regret, wanting as much as eerie silence craves a whisper. I was succumbing to the worst high of my life- Oxycodone. Something of a sin, a sin when taken on a stomach turning in on itself. 

I’m a freshman in high school, I wear the badge of honor being a Fort Collins Lambkin. This is the year characterized by the sliding of my right kneecap, and subsequently, my left. It’s a warm and constant pain-the dislocation. The year of despair. 

A boyfriend- who finds solace in being subservient, maybe because he’s truly just a boy. 

We entered my home. The hinges complaining of the force and weight of the ponderous doors, the walls breathing-suddenly puffing their chest out. The fridge door was in a mood- angered at the fingerprints that littered it. My boyfriend was there, rummaging as if he were a bandit… stealing what was left of me—sprouts, sourdough, tomatoes. His juvenile hands make my weakened body a sandwich. With his swiftness, I assumed that he smelled the sweetness on my breath, maybe he saw my primitive nature awakening and my ravenous spirit rising. 

The door screams in agony once again- mirroring my pain- my Mama enters. Her angelic figure glows as she becomes my haven. My eyes met hers and I knew. I knew I was leaving myself. “I’m going to pass out,” I said, and the words stretched like the hair tie I once favored so- thinned to the point of breakage. Ecclesiastes 3:20 rang in my near vacant mind: All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. God’s call. The earth’s cry. The lonesome song- beckoning for me. I submit and obey. I become the purest version of myself. Embedded in only myself. All external forces dispel. I’m left with purity. The light is so often mentioned has become me. 

A life lesson arises: don’t take Oxycodone on an empty stomach. 

Panic overcomes me. It seeps between the grouted lines of the kitchen tile. I- folded inwards, and crackers crumbled against my teeth like communion. A glass of water is planted before me like an offering, with an orange straw, and the boyfriend says it’s your favorite, like he knows something about me that I never chose to give him. He held my hand and called it love. 

Scared and juvenile, the boyfriend left. He had done all that a boy could. 

Mama lifted me: my burdens, my sorrow, my naked body. Heaved me into the pounding water of the shower. Steam arose, it still wasn’t enough to hide me. The water hit my skin with a ferocity that mirrored the fire that had burned me before—before I surrendered, before I passed out. This time it found its home beneath only my eyes. The everlasting fire claimed that cavern as its final resting place. Where it would stay until one of us is no more. The place where the sorrow settles like dust on the plains… finally home. 

I’m not able to lift my own body into the shower for weeks. My Mama is the one who heaves the weight of me, in and out of the shower. 

As I’m lifted, I want to mourn. Not for the pain, or the mobility lost or the knee that would never be the same, but for the reflection staring back at me. The mirror straight ahead took my soul. I could see the body that was no longer mine. To mourn that I’m commanding a body that wouldn’t obey. I’m repaying a debt- to whom I’m still not certain. The price I had to pay was to stand under that steam, under the eyes of criticism, to be bare, stripped of all dignity and hope. There was no redemption, the ritual of scrubbing, the heat stripping- nothing could rid me of my filth. Scrubbing with one hand, balancing as if I were some tragically magnificent tightrope walker who only had one leg. 

I refuse to touch my left knee. It isn’t mine anymore. It no longer belongs to me, not in the way a body should belong to a person.  It’s attached to me but it will never be mine. Numb, aching and grotesquely large. Remnants of black markings from the steady hand of my surgeon. My knee twisted and mangled, only there to remind me of what had been, and what would never again be. And somewhere, beneath the surface of my stretched, unhuman skin, under layers of muscle and tendon, I could feel it—the whisper of a cadaver’s hamstring, stretching over the ruins of my knee, I knew then- at that moment- that it would haunt me. 

It wasn’t my body anymore. It was something else. Something I didn’t know how to live with.…

I believe in seeing auras.
Not the kind the mystics chase, or psychics interpret, not the ones wrapped in sage. I mean the ones that come when the world turns upside down, as a beached whale does. When pain hums so loud behind your eyes that the light itself starts to bleed. The doctor’s office glowed with orange and yellow hues. It was sickly warm. Pulsing not with comfort, nor safety… it was too intentional, too curated. It was repulsively welcoming.

I’m at the Children’s Hospital in Aurora. My Mama is at my side. I’m sitting on the bright white paper that crinkles with the shift of my weight. My left knee has started sliding- paralleling the rebellion that my right knee trailblazed months prior. 

A nurse sits across from me—wearing a white coat and gentle voice. She is a stout brunette woman, but a gatekeeper all the same. And she gave me the choice.

“I’m not certain that the damage present in your knee is enough for a mandatory surgery. This is going to be a choice for you to make. We can talk through your options… There are pros and cons to both options. It’s a question of how much it bothers you. Is this a pain you’re willing to tolerate throughout your life?” She briefly paused and searched my face before continuing, “You’ve done this before. You know the pain that you’ll be facing. You understand the recovery process, and the duration. What would you like to do?” 

“Will I have the same surgeon? Will my knees look the same?” I questioned, as the tears welled. 

My surgeon gives me a doting look, as sympathy is leaking from his pores. 

“I would be operating on you once again. I truly believe in symmetry, therefore, I will do my best to make them as ‘attractive’ as possible. Fairwarning, there is no telling how well they will heal. You may have purple scars for the rest of your life.” His tone remains even. 

“I want to deal with it now. It’s already painful to walk, let alone be an athlete,” my words squeaked out. 

I had left out the part that I’d already been stripped of my athletic identity. Stripped of my entire identity. I’m already baren, so just take what is left of me. I feel like a home that’s being torn apart at the seams. When they are through with me, I will be nothing but a vacant lot. I’m not angry, I never have been quick to anger. But, I was suddenly shaking on the kitchen floor again. That orange straw staring at me.  Daunting, telling that it knew something that wasn’t me. Now my surgeon is the boy taking something from me, but I chose to give it to him. 

“I’ll pull up the schedule and we can choose the date.” Her voice sings so surely.
The option.
To burn again. To reopen the wound. To descend back into the furnace of recovery. She called it a choice. Optional. As though someone handed me the blade and asked if I’d mind holding it to the warmth of my body, and making that cut. 

In what world would I choose this?

In what world would I crawl back to the altar, offering my body for sacrifice, again?

And I thought: maybe I was glowing, too. Maybe the aura she saw surrounding me was just the last flicker- a remnant of someone who used to be whole.

…

Summer announced itself with pain. The heat of hell burning within my soul, a fire that came not from the world outside but from the flesh, from the bones themselves. Almost as though my body had become its own forge. This time, it was the right knee—the one I had hoped would survive, and that would be the last to betray me. But it, too, failed. My body is “cheaply built,” as Mama liked to say. I just called it betrayal. A rebellion of a body I no longer claimed as mine, a body I no longer wanted. It is tethering me to this world, yet binding me to my misery… all in the same. I crumpled. The weight of myself, of this body that had once been mine, was too much to bear. I couldn’t carry it anymore. It was like God pulling the string beneath a marionette He’d grown tired of watching, maybe a show He was sick of. Maybe I was the show He didn’t want to see anymore. Like water through a sieve, pressing me down. Pressing me into dust, never to rise again.

I made the decision to follow through with the second knee surgery weeks ago. I suppose it didn’t really sink in until I’m in the repulsive green gown with blue embellishments. I’m being lifted from the comfort of a warm bed to the cold, less welcoming operating table. As I’m surrounded, there are chattering remarks. Remarks of my height, my build, my beauty. I lock eyes with one man who’s taking part in the chattering. As I meet his striking blue eyes I realize he’s my anesthesiologist. I have a sneaking suspicion that he has the most perfect smile under his mask. I sink into his words, his voice is dripping with honey.  I’ve always been fond of anesthesiologists. I think it takes a certain kind of person to be warm enough to guide people to sleep, or to death and have their minds be clear and calm. This stranger is my solace, and he is my temporary savior. I’m ready. 

I went under. Not with faith, not with hope, just a prayer, that’s ragged, and gasping. Not for salvation—but to let someone know that I was afraid. Afraid of being forgotten, of being left alone in this hollow body. When I woke, I knew I’d find no father beside me. No kind word from a man who knew exactly what I needed but had never known how to give it. No, just Mama. Always Mama. She’s enough. But she’s all I have left.

When I woke up, I found the dryness of my mouth, the pressure on my chest, that fire—the same fire—back, burning beneath the layers of gauze, compression, yellow antiseptic. Somewhere beneath it all, I could feel it: the hamstring, stretched and stitched into my body-foreign. It didn’t belong to me. It had been manipulated and crafted and placed there, like a lie I had agreed to carry. 

There was no boy this time. No one to catch me when I fell, no one to love me through the haze of pills and pain. I’d since been cut off from painkillers— I was limited to “just enough to get by”. 

It was Mama who lifted me again. Her arms were tired, her body old in ways she never let on, ways she always hid beneath the motion of loving me. Her body withered and weathered from years of unkind farm work. She was the one who would lay my lazy body across the bed. She would be back every two hours, like clockwork- like my personal nurse. Day or night, Mama was there. She was by my side, she gave all of herself in return for a fragment of who I once was. 

The knee was yellow, bruised and swollen, the black marker lines still faint. I would never touch it. Not with my hand. Not with my mind. It belonged now to the surgeon, to the dead donor, to God maybe—but not to me. It belonged to someone else. Something I could never claim.

Every movement felt like betrayal. Every flex, every bend, a question I didn’t want to answer. A truth I couldn’t face.

But the truth is, I had already left myself. Somewhere between December and June, between the first dislocation and the second, I had gone missing. In the space between, I had lost the girl I had been, the one who could stand on her own, the one who thought she knew who she was. Now, I live inside a body that still bears my name. Yet it is a body that is no longer my own, though it still carries the traces of me. 

…

As I peer in the rearview mirror, I see everything in an orange haze- that same sickly warm haze that occupied the doctors office. I witness the tears and the terror. I begin to mourn for who I always envisioned myself being. I’m faced with the haunting realization that I am human. I am a piece of paper that has been crumpled with excruciating force…I can’t take those divots out of myself. But, for it I have discovered who I am meant to be. I ponder if that was a necessary journey that I had to take to become softer, to become more kind. I still mourn who I thought I would be, and the dreams that that girl had. I like to honor her, even though she is no longer a part of me. She is a stranger that I wish nothing but success to… in another life.