Unpacking
When the pain is persistent enough, you unzip your body and step out of your skin. Doctors cry No while backing away from what is raw. But you are tired of carrying their recommendations—bottles of pills, a meditative breath, a scale to manage pain like meat in the butcher’s window. You can no longer hoist this baggage into the overhead compartment. So you unspool the gauze they have used to bind you to your flesh. You snip the stitches meant to suture your wounds silent.
Empty, you consider what is necessary. What is a stomach except a vessel for hunger? What are the ribs except a cage for the body? You abandon your spleen, leave your liver for some fool. You wind your own intestines around your feet so they don’t try to follow you home. You think, for a moment, you might pack your bones, but they are too heavy to bear. At last you pack only your smile, the one you use to reassure others, to tell them, “I’m fine.”
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice and Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, which The Atlantic says, “Exemplifies a nuanced approach to life with mental illness” and The Paris Review describes as “The wakeup call we need.” She is also the author of the essay collection Halfway from Home, winner of a Nautilus Book Award for lyric prose, the flash collection Abbreviate, and three poetry chapbooks. She is founder of Nerve to Write, a magazine for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers, and Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.