Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. […] One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
The patient sits on the loveseat in the breezeway looking at all the lilies in the garden and wondering with an urgency she is trying in vain to subdue if her life will ever change. Will the strife of the spine surgery be worth it—there’s a chance, the surgeon insists, that the procedure and its aftermath won’t change a thing; will she be able to find employment after this indefinite swath of recovery; will she meet someone with whom she can spend her days, or will she continue to avoid the online dating scene because of not being able to bear one more squalid date? (Is it even possible anymore to meet someone on the outskirts of the electronic ether, live and in the world with pheromones and worn-in jeans instead of with seven smiling headshots glowing on her computer screen?) She wonders if she would be so awash in conflicting emotion about her solitariness if it weren’t highlighted by her neighbors, robust families with young children who often and for no reason howl “Daddy! Mommy!” with delight. They also cry unabashedly, a fierce, shameless cry that the patient admires. Sometimes, when the patient is overwhelmed by the inexplicable, as she lately is, she tears up with them there on her side of the fence.
The patient looks out and realizes that a bunny the size of a thistle is a few feet before her, eating a leaf in perfect rhythm, not at all deterred by its measure, that it is hanging out of its mouth for a mile. Just chewing and chewing, as if the act itself were the most spectacular thing about being alive. No, not even; because, the patient envies, the bunny, being a bunny, is eating without a weakness for naming. The patient then experiences a longing with a strength unlike any other: She wishes that she could return to the state of the children, of the bunny—the state of purity that is without story. A state opposite of what this world is—image, image, image. To not be thirty-six and wondering when the narrative of a convalescing single will change (and wondering, even, if it is in contrast with spiritual equanimity to want it to. Wondering because, in the same breath, the patient knows that without want there is just a whole lot of nothing). Nor thirty-six and trying to steel herself (or evolve) into a state of acceptance regarding it all—all the restless uncertainty.
The patient puts her neck brace aside and, as she tries to walk toward the baby rabbit without causing it to startle, she realizes that she may look like someone who is moving as though she were trying to balance a phone book on her head. Someone who keeps her neck still and straight by bending from her knees and turning from her torso. There is a stiff elegance about her, she imagines, which makes her feel less lame. The wind rustles the Steri-strips on her incision and the patient wonders what it means that the surgical ink has dripped in such a way that there is now a perfect blue cross on her neck. She wonders, too, why the incision across her throat is so long. Didn’t the surgeon originally say that it would be an inch to an inch and a half in length? It is more like two. The rabbit pounces away into a tall flower patch surrounded by trees.
And the rising space that distinguishes the four Japanese Maples—white garage wall and pointed roofs and mellow sky—is akin to the patient’s ridging storylines, tempting with the ostensible beauty of definition, sealing confinement. Three of the Maples are on the other side of the fence. But when the patient looks up as far as she can, which isn’t very far given her mending neck, the edges alter, softening in breaths of light. With the weightlessness of day branches swell and tangle and gleam, breaking through the sky-lines, and the patient feels the names and the images and the presumptions and the fears—the cravenly narratives themselves—collapse. There is no room for them—their splintered thinness, their singularity, their limits. There is only the saturated depth of dusk on an early summer evening holding upswept limbs, scarlet greens and the audacity of the moment, expansive and undivided.
Wrens on a Wire by Amanda Varrella 