Vertebrae
My spine is a disaster area.
The stresses of poverty mingle with the malaise brought on by oppressive summer heat and the growing understanding that the things I want from life are increasingly unattainable, these scraps of discontent lodge themselves between my nerves and bones until my vertebrae are surrounded by the ache of uneasiness and disquiet. The tension allies with the scoliosis I inherited from my mother and conspires to deepen the curve in the column that should be supporting me. I am usually in pain, but I’ve learned to ignore it. It isn’t difficult, the pain is more a low groan than a scream. It is dull, the color of regurgitated avocados, rather than red or white.
People compliment me on my posture and my stomach is smooth and flat with muscles from holding myself up when my back fails me (there is very little that is less attractive than a tall woman who slouches) but I am working against so much. I want to crawl out of myself and take a knife to my back. I want to make a long, neat slice down my spine, to pull back the skin, and pry apart my little bones and nerves and tissue. I would extract the suffering and put it all back together properly, building it up like an anatomical model, regaining the inch I lost somewhere between my seventeenth and eighteenth birthday. But that’s impossible, and so instead I wait to be old and bent to one side.