When he kicked me, I didn't feel anything. Just the compression of
my chest and stomach, the air being forced from my lungs again and
again. No pain, only movement.
It wasn't until fifteen minutes
later that my body was socked with the agony of what had happened, so
powerful it made me literally double over. As I sat on the curb
sobbing, one Bobbie questioned me about my assailant while another
gingerly wrapped my hand with gauze in a manner I imagined
similar to how the embalmers of ancient Egypt spooled long strips of
cloth about their dead. In the weeks that followed I would have to
perform this ritual every few hours myself, carefully tending the wound
like a loved thing though it was a gash so deep and ugly the chemist I'd visit
the following morning would audibly gasp when she saw
it.
When I jolted awake in the night overwhelmed with fear and shocked by the
relentless hurting, my friend held me. And it seemed that his arms comprised
the fabric of a net pulling the fragments of me together, that those arms
were the only thing keeping me from disappearing into the pain. Cradled
against him for those few moments I could almost convince myself
that I wasn't irretrievably broken, but once again whole and safe and not at all alone.
