NINETEEN

I’ve been up since midnight and I’ve written 1300 words about a trip to California I took last year and also the last year. I send the first few paragraphs to Greg, “is this anything?” He messages back that I am a poet and I need not forget it. Hours later we’re workshopping via voice memo between New York and New Zealand. I’ve been avoiding this essay for months. I’ve been avoiding asking myself questions I don’t know the answer to. I write about the Pacific Ocean and monarch butterflies. I write about evolution and creating. I write about why I withhold what I need and want from myself.

After all the feeding tubes and abdominal surgeries and 63 days of hospital stays, I’m who I wish I had been back then. I’m who I needed back then. After all of it, I am who I want people to know. An evolved and evolving version of myself, who learns from transgressions and doesn’t believe in mistakes. Who takes care of herself and knows what to say and what not to say. I have traveled physical miles and I have traveled emotional miles. I am in a place completely different and exactly the same.

The person I was a year ago and the person I am now form a new self. I have woken up from countless surgeries, have let go of an organ my own body destroyed, have learned to live with tubes, bags, tape, gauze. I have learned and am learning to live with the curling and unfurling of monarch wings and redwood leaves, with changing. I am a new form of myself, of existing and being, of self creation and recreation. I am writing and rewriting my story as I am living it. I am writing and rewriting the ideas of perfection and probability. I am saying, in my own words, that I choose to be seen, to be visible, and to be possible.