By Eli Cugini
I get home from the hospital and I order Taco Bell for the third time in my life. I used to have boobs and now I no longer have boobs. That was the hospital.
In some unserious sense I was expecting to die. If I survived, I was expecting to sink into my body like a small child, all bulbous head and blinking. Now I am alive and I want to eat. There is care around me, and I want to take it in, chew it to liquid, let it flow. But I have tubes running under my skin, which hurt, and a meddle of opiates in my system, and I am, accordingly, bad at eating. This is the only time in the first two weeks that it will feel good.
My wife brings it to me: crispy chicken burrito, nacho fries, Pepsi Max in a tilting cup, mini churros, of which I eat all but one. I love my wife. I feel kinship with her and kinship with the burrito. You, burrito. I, burrito. Both of us sealed along a new seam.
I sleep, and in that time the last loop of churro hardens, becomes impenetrable.
🌯
There is a layer of medical compressor, then of cotton wool, then of tape and bandage, then of inscrutable suture, and then me. In my sleep, a stranger messages me that he is very sad that I was permitted to do this. I should have gotten counseling. He is so sad. I wonder how he can pass all those layers to find the me to be sad for when I can’t. The tubes hurt me and I do not even know where they are. I guess the locations of my nipples and I am inaccurate.
I am happy, I am happy, I am happy, meaning, I will be happy when I can be anything. I wake up and idly scrub at my shoulders, which are, like the spots of nacho fry seasoning on my bedside table, bright orange. Betadine. I taste, according to Google, bad. A warning kind of bitter. Anyone tonguing for salt here would know to go home.
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My body has been sliced against its grain: good practice for meat, bad for fabric. Healing feels like they made a mistake – I feel all fabric, a live mesh of moving fibres, and nothing like meat, nothing like food at all. But what else could being food feel like? Mute resistance. Flesh will never be a soft new cake again, never an open stone-fruit, not even in dreams.
Psychodrama aside, healing is dull. Lying stiffly in my wraps, I let my hour roll tick down. Nothing is unbearable and sometimes that makes it worse, because I cannot be flung out of my mind.
Awake at 3am, I chew on the forgotten churro, which will not break. Eventually it grudgingly sheds its sugar.
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When the medicine hasn’t kicked in yet, I lull myself into rest, if not sleep, by telling myself the story of how I got here. It is a middling story, good for a captive audience. It has a satisfying cadence but not much variation. When I was a young something or other I would roll myself up so tight in the bedding you could see nothing but a pair of eyes…
At times I feel robbed of my promised joy, my whirling, world-shattering joy, because my brain adjusted immediately. All these years of wounded attachment, and forgetting my old body was like forgetting nothing. An insult. Wasn’t it always like this? I try to grasp at my prior, abundant unhappiness, but the person from before is already out on the raft, disappearing into the creamy white surf, to drown or to simply exist away from me. It does not owe me its grief.
Still, I thought I had bought a little time.
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I say I cut them off because it’s funny, but that doesn’t make it true. Everything is still there, just shifted, made strange. Altered levels of rock or sea. Handfuls of flour that leach and turn and disappear themselves. Have you ever felt like a decision you made wasn’t really a decision, but a recognition of what had to happen? A force you were simply admitting would act on you: fold you, fill you, send you out?
Have you ever felt dishonest when people call you brave? But the sea is brave.
My wife makes me dinner, brings water, repeats water, plays anxious music, curls around my drains as she sleeps. Both of us wait for me to re-enter the world.
The day after they finish sewing me back together, I will order delivery, lick salt and oil off her fingers and a stray curve of hair, have her open me up. For now, I am almost asleep and she is playing a game. I hear violins in the next room presaging fighting, and I fail to turn onto my side. If they rush the door, they will see me on my back and think me awake, or dead.
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A good burrito does not strain or fight; it contains what it contains. For today, flat in my vest, I am a good burrito.
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Eli Cugini (he/they) is a critic and PhD student based in Manchester, UK. His work has appeared in The Baffler, Gawker, Dazed, Eurogamer, Xtra and elsewhere. His interests include transsexuality, quiz shows, bouldering, and finding the perfect buttermilk chicken tender. Find him on Twitter @uncanny_eli.
Taco Bell Quarterly 