Three years had swept by and with every passing, I found myself slowly withering away, morphing into some wobbly, crooked, configuration. I had become friends with the suffocating compression and its cyclical nature. I listened for the wind of its storm, waiting for it to cue my usual regiment; canceling plans, recycling the same excused absence email, taking care in attaching the latest doctor’s note, and preparing my shadowy cave for a long-unproductive slumber. The germs, as they always do, deposited themselves onto the naked sheath that is my tonsils, rendering my throat a collection of serrated and oxidized blades. The waves took pity on me. They knew to roll in sets, while I knew to follow and re-build around each set. There were the destructive types, the types that are relentless in their crashing upon you, hoping to eat away the narrow path that is your breathing canal. Then there were the constructive waves, the ones that planned in secret, quietly sponging up every trace of bacteria, waiting for the perfect time to ambush your vulnerable immune system. The doctors then did not make good stewards. They couldn’t make sense of a chronic, reoccurring viral infection, nor could their myriad of tests and vitamin regiments map the storm’s course. And so, the waves continued to pummel the gravely shores of my throat until their toxicity was beyond their potency. My tonsils had to be unearthed at once.
When you are drowning in a sea of unfulfilled personhood, the storm does not care.
It still drags you out to meet its swells even if you don’t feel like getting wet.
I had spent my first year of college floundering. I was looking for an established root to tightly grip, but instead, I was white-knuckled in my once dorm room, now infirmary. Desperate to make friends and collect enough memories to reinforce the unsteady soil beneath me. I wanted to report home having shown some sense of identity expansion, but instead I was chiseled away. Eventually the squalls drifted out to the deep sea and the rising tide of suffocating compression subsided. The back of my throat, now memorializing my tonsils and adenoids, remains sturdy – unbothered by the weathering sea of the past.
