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You’re making it look worse for attention, you say, when all that everyone sees in me is a loose shirt with a bulge at the back like the wind’s cut through and pulled the cloth backward. I can't take it off for the whole day, even at night. When I tell you, “I can’t sleep on a fluffy bed,” you reply, “wooden beds are Korean-drama aesthetic.”
So make me a Pinterest board. You’ll be typing “scoliosis” into the search board with cute emojis beside the ‘s instead of watching me twice a month, lying on my stomach on a weight bench, wondering how many people in battle died in that position.
Sixty jabs of a needle, I count, before losing track and giving up as blood oozes down my back, running down the pathway that was my spine. A pre-schooler could learn to write the letter S by following the dark crimson blotches, blackened by the clots that made my muscles bulge. Oftentimes you look at my back and mumble to yourself, “that brace she wears, it’s all she complains about.” But one day I’ll flex my muscles and you’ll mistake it for the metal contraption, since after all, they’re similar in the way that it pops out among my flesh. A real head-turner.
It’s only an external condition, it could be much worse, you say. Only. A word to either love or loathe. This is your only option; the second option, the doctor says, “You wouldn’t have to pick your poison and stay up all night, contemplating between a short, indescribable hell or a longer, slower torture that people will get sick of hearing because there are scarier surgeries out there. This one is only a spine, a line that exists in your upper body.”
If there’s only one choice, I wouldn’t have to corrupt my mind with the countless ways a chronic disease could progress, or whether progress means to get better or worse (it means worse, by the way.)
Then there is “Only you could make yourself get better” and this is when I want to hang myself on a pull-up bar and fall backward without any rope connecting my legs to the poles. But I can’t, because the appointment for that treatment is still next Saturday.
Don’t leave my health to me, because I wasn’t born to overcome the barricades. I was born to feel safe, tucked into a bed that doesn’t feel like the stone-cold floor. I trusted myself once, leaving my body free of protection. Then my bones opened fire, twisting my spine to cross the other area. The agony spreads like gunfire, and sometimes my imagination drifts away because my mind is a wanderer. And my back is a battlefield, nothing but.
Don’t trust my fair-weather attitude and happy-go-lucky mindset to be loyal to grit and become a disciple to discipline, either. Pull-up bars, dumbbells, and yoga balls won’t rub me off my sixth sense that this is holding me back from the life I should be living.
“It doesn’t look that difficult,” you say no matter what, because I hold my body together with a rigid posture, one that no earthquake can bend, and the ghost of a smile tugging on my lips is a supernatural being that no mind-reader could see through. Even if they were already dead, I’m taking this aching pain and affliction to the grave. Avoiding you is sparing my spit. However, next time, when I feel validated enough to meet, please stand up, spine elongated, straight, and tall. Doesn’t one do that every time they see a soldier?
About The Author
Cailey Tin is a mixed-raced staff writer and podcast co-host at The Incandescent Review, and an interview editor at Paper Crane Journal. Her work was recognized by Spillwords Press and published in Fairfield Scribes, Gypsophila zine, Alien Magazine, The Inflections, and more, under the pen name Cailey Tarriane.
Edited by Ashlynn Zhang
Cover page by Jiaying Chen