Page 6 of The Scars I Bare
Opening the drawer of my desk, I leafed through several black-and-white composition notebooks I’d already filled, looking for the one I was currently scribbling in, but before I got to it, another caught my eye. Pulling it out, my fingers traced over the date on the front, noticing how shaky the handwriting was. I remembered how much every letter had hurt back then. Thumbing through the tattered notebook, I found an entry that caught my attention.
I met a woman today.
A nurse actually.
A gorgeous angel of a nurse. God, I wish she weren’t my nurse.
She greeted me on her first shift, a wide, happy smile spread across her face.
I smiled back and…nothing.
I said absolutely nothing. I opened my mouth to spout out something witty and charming, a skill I’d honed back in my early twenties when one-night stands with tourists was the singular most important task of my life.
But, instead, I was left speechless.
Like I’d lost my voice instead of my arm on that ferryboat.
She smiled again, a smaller one, as she ran through my chart, asking questions to which I could only nod.
God, I was a fucking loser.
A loser with one arm.
That’s what they’ll call me.
The loser with one arm.
I thought I could go back.
Back to my life.
Back to normal.
But what is normal now?
I shook my head, remembering that moment like it was yesterday. Cora, the gorgeous nurse who’d lit up my small little world for a short while. I’d thought she might be the answer to everything.
I’d thought a lot of things back then.
And none of it had led to anything.
Three years later, I was still searching for that new normal I’d written about in my journal.
It didn’t exist.
Blog Entry #1
I guess I should come up with a better title than Blog Entry #1, but forgive me…I’m new to this whole online journaling thing.
And drastically behind.
I was informed by a tech-savvy eight-year-old niece of mine the other day that blogging is “so last year” and that, if I really wanted to be noticed, I needed to be on YouTube.
In front of a camera. Or do they do it with a phone?
However it’s officially done, it sounds highly intimidating, so although I am grateful for my niece’s recommendation, I think I’ll stick to the old method.
Or the old, new method?
