The Diminutive Dots of Laparoscopic Have Always Felt Like Nothing to Me

If you look at the packaging, you don’t know how much blood I was losing this day.

If you see the gentlemen helping me out on my boot (to be fair, my back was extra out that day and it’s really just the left I struggle with), you don’t know we had one of those predictable marriage arguments the night before. The kind that feels like it’s been rehearsed before. A play where you’ve never met the ‘wright.

If you like short cheeky pieces of footage like most of us have been trained to these days and not Sunday Morning style width of any kind, then you might not even read this. Or watch 40-seconds of meaningless chaps chatting the way through. This truly is fluff. Combat boot’ed fluff. (Fur coat fluff?) BUT you definitely won’t see that this cheekiness was front loaded by a long night of near constant bathroom trips because I was (it turns out) spiking high blood sugars but didn’t realize it.

The blood loss was digestive (need I say more?) and alarming and the second multi-day-round in just a couple of weeks. The high sugars were just another way that blood can manifest itself as a malcontent… even if dressed head to toe in its very color.

Color is something I so rarely choose (and rarely will again) but when the monochrome feels like a masterful system… another word for protection… I’ll control most anything to feel like I’m not matched with a body that’s out of control.

“Voila, my scar!” I think in my mind in the voice of Madeline… feeling ridiculous that I’m someone literally COVERED in large scars and yet I’ve chosen to hate this new stomach adornment. ‘Why even bother? Isn’t it a little late?’

The diminutive dots of laparoscopic have always felt like nothing to me; already too far gone. Like constellations that are treated just like most of us treat the stars: we rarely stop to even notice them.

But elongated ones which seem etched into a cloth doll from Paris? That pin skin in such a way that you know when you grow (when, not if) it will only look odder; like a circus tent who’s center has been hammered into the ground with a mallet; hungry elephant nearby.

There is nothing to see here but a lonely hungry circus.

A bad body with a left combat boot that won’t ‘boot’ without help. Constellations no one notices (let alone I), but Ursa Majors and Big Dippers and Minor Leons that I’m still not convinced exist. We just point at the sky and name things without ever thinking about how fleeting our ability to do that from this perspective will one day be. How the chance to look up is a ticking time bomb; A scar of a human wrapped in red. A system with fake names (yes, I made up that third one).

Did you pay attention?

We don’t. Not to stars… or scars on anyone else (it’s not on us so who really cares?)… or scars on someone with scars all over anyways (the meaninglessness means even less).

Not to systems that give us fake feelings of control, and not to how romantic or playful playing at life can look when you don’t know what’s bloody going on behind-the-scenes.

40 seconds…

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