All hail Lord Carhuayo of the House of Flint!
“What does it mean to be a human, trapped within an ever-fluctuating physical form? To have a body is to be paired with machinery that one does not understand, to be at the will of nature’s entropy, change and decay, and to constantly desire to improve and control it despite all of this.”
there’s this weird thing in my wrist
by Robert Carhuayo
There’s this weird thing in my wrist. The right one, specifically. Like, when I bend both of my hands back, my left wrist feels completely flat and “normal.” My right wrist, on the other hand (get it? other hand haha), has this weird bump on the right side. I’m a bit scared that I’ve broken something, and that’s some bit of bone that’s going to break through my skin any second now. Obviously I could just check in with a doctor or some pre-med student (because honestly, who doesn’t know a pre-med student?), but I suppose I’m scared of the possibility that they’ve never seen something like that before. Imagine that face: someone who knows much more than you looking at you without the special brand of fear that stems from the unknown. I think I’ll just keep poking at it for now, and hoping for the best.
Come to think of it, there’s also a weird thing in my wrist. And it’s also the right one. I did the bend back my hand thing and everything, and I can feel it, fuck. I was freaking out the whole time that if I bent my hand too far back, it would just finally breach my skin, my fucking bone in open air. God what a horrific image. Can you check your wrist too? You’re a pre-med right?
Do you have it? I want to know if it’s like, normal, if other people have it. This is a thing that’s known about right? I’m going to be okay, right? Why are you looking at me like that. Please, just say something! You can’t just look at me like that, is this normal or not?!? I can’t stop touching it, is it gonna make it worse?!? Why did I read this stupid story, I can’t stop touching it. Please. Just say something.
Be honest with me, you’ve touched your wrists by now, haven’t you? Yes, you, the reader. There could be something weird in there, so you might as well check. Better yet, just go ahead and compare all the minute little differences and similarities between the left and the right. You can already start to feel it, can’t you? Your skin is starting to tear. The bone is starting to peek out. You can’t put it back in, you can’t fix your skin, and you’ll never get a new wrist. No one else can help you. No one even knows how. They’ll look at you with pity and disgust. You are deformed, strange, different. Touch it. Touch your bone, unburdened by the barrier of flesh.
I’ve got this weird thing in my wrist. Only my right one, for some reason, and I figured it would be an interesting thing to write about. The grotesque imagery about the bone came later, as I dwelled on the idea. Like anyone afraid of something unknown, I considered who could best help me understand what’s happening, and if I have just cause for anxiously wondering about my wrist. However, there is always the possibility that no one knows, for there’s a lot of things we don’t know. Yet, our curiosity compels us to check our own bodies, to tap certain parts of it.
We seek out the unknown, for fear that it pertains to us as well. We’re meant to know everything about ourselves. We explore ideas around us to try and better understand ourselves. We give ideas power in the stories we conceptualize, read, and tell to each other. We anxiously poke and prod, assuming the worst, and hoping for the best. Even something as silly as a weird thing in our wrists has the capacity to haunt us. Maybe it has the potential to connect us, too.