Português
Non Fiction by Désirée Jung
The cut on the right side of my neck is as important as the sewing on my left side, which will be redone later. The mending, the surgeon leaves imperfect, without plastic retouches. Still, with time, the scar begins to heal, erasing and disappearing, at least on the outside. Inside, the incision leaves marks, flaws, causing a process of renaming; an estrangement of nerves scissored in the affected region, orphaned from their former function, disoriented from cerebral sources, directing quiverings to my hips when they should send the info elsewhere, and make my fingers tremble.
But who cares? I am free of this body who thought of itself as controllable. I let the doctors remain confident in the science that the ligatures on the right side of my neck will return to normal, growing and rebirthing as before. In the meantime, I experience the unexpected void of surprises dissolving my fantasies of a continuous omnipotent body into the aftershocks between my skin and its relentless spirit, who tell a different story. The thirst left behind, once the base of the tongue is necrosed by radiation, its verbs burned, an uncertain but transformed pulse released from within.
The mutilation of language summons its insistent cries to reveal a history of excess: ancestral accumulation of debris into my mouth but also the ingenious recovery of what I forgot: my bliss for presence taking me back to the trenchings of the cut, the incision that reduced the paradise of my ancestors into ashes. From here, I stand on an arid foundation, a soil eager to reconquer the wetness of silences whilst attempting to reconnect the words with its new reset letters, not often prying offsprings, and yet bounded to the balsam of living as I reinstate the frontiers of this new refunded land.
Published at Sunhous Review, Issue 1, Volume 02, October 2024.
