The Prothesis Inside Me

The prothesis inside me is speaking: they took your cartilage away because you had no cartilage and traded it in for your new right knee.

This bargain made sense at the time of the procedure, though nothing was said that the recovery would lack sleep. And sleep did seem unattainable, a small white pill beside the bed that you were supposed to take 2 or 3 times a day when the pain became unbearable.

Sleep was doomed from the beginning it seems. So instead of sleeping you read from Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, a wonderful book written by a wonderful writer who made a nightly practice of resisting sleep, believing it was a sort of privilege not to sleep, that sleep was a bogeyman.   

But you just thought you weren’t sleeping; apparently you were.

By the third week the dreams came. You couldn’t keep up with the dreams, they felt like a commentary on the whole xeriscape of your life, the flowering plum tree, the ivy, the cactus. Faces you hadn’t seen for years, some you’d rather have never seen in the first place, appeared and insisted on playing a major role in your dreams. Your children had grown very old, your mother was a beautiful young woman who gave you your love of words before you were born, your best friend had become your mortal enemy…

 …the problem was that you couldn’t separate the good dreams—and there were some—from the terrifying.

And so, you became comfortable being wide awake at 2 am every single day and calling the darkness you’d always find there, the light. It was a much stranger life than the life you’d been living, the life you’d been given at birth, as if an alien had entered your inner space and become a part of you.

“Self-Portrait of My Socks”, oil & acrylic, 24” x 24”, 2023. By permission of the author.