We had just laughed about how we had made it to the last day of our honeymoon without getting hurt. It felt like a real success because we had broken our boards in heavy surf and we were both ok. In hindsight, I wish instead I could have somehow prepared for this, that I could have told myself / If you find yourself unimaginably wounded, at some point I promise you'll start to feel better. // You can think about wellness as a well, a deep dwelling that is dark and liquid and seemingly bottomless until all of a sudden it isn't. That would make the inverse of wellness a void, a lack of something than can't be found because it's missing from some place that is too deep to know. When its gone, you’ll feel like everything else is ajar, unhinged, unable to be held or poured or swallowed. Deep down, somewhere, you cracked and everything leaked out to somewhere else. // The emptiness will remind you that something has been taken from you. It feels like it was stolen because you know you didn't give permission. Some will say you have to wait for it to come back. Or maybe, they will look at you and want to see that you have it back already even though you don't - and maybe that is your fault for pretending - but you can't show them they are wrong by pointing to the emptiness because they won't see anything there. // Your new heroes will be the ones who see the emptiness and respect you for it. The people who kiss you right on your scar, who touch their own face when they look at yours, who will thank you for telling them that you aren't doing well. You don't have to tell these people that you got three times as many stitches inside your mouth where they can't see or explain how exactly someone else’s surfboard fin entered and exited your face to begin with, but you can tell them that you thought your face was gone - that you still feel like your face is gone - that you felt the ocean move through you and take some of you away with it and felt your return to dust begin. When someone tells you you're more beautiful this way you believe them just enough to consider it. You'll let them feel all of the scar, even the mountain range that runs along the inside of your lip, and down inside to your jaw bone and all of the way up along your gums and you will marvel together over the intricacy of the topography. You'll cry so hard in her arms that you both shake in unison until something else breaks open and your well will begin to fill back up. // But meanwhile, you'll feel like a stranger to the person closest to you because he saw everything you didn't and he won't be able to describe it to you. It will make you angry because he's your greatest hero., you'll want him to play the hero in your story and he won't want to be in it at all. He will be unable to unsee the pictures being taken of your opened face for your doctors. When you tried to look at them so that you could understand why everything hurt so fucking much, your eyes refused focus. He will be the only one who can say exactly how much you bled, you’ll only remember the taste. You’ll remember the look on his face when you pulled yourself into the boat, when you tried to asked him what happened to my face? // a deep cut // is it still there? // yes, it’s still there. You’ll want him to press his hands to your face to feel the sublime return to wholeness from the horror of detachment, and you'll want to scream again into his hands because you'll remember how that felt on the floor of the boat, with him wrapped around you so tight, trying to press the soft pieces of you back together. But now you won't be able to make any sound at all - maybe because you don't want to feel anything, or because you think he's holding too many of your screams already. So instead the scream will churn inside you and the undertow will hold you down, away from him. // Most of the time you'll hate your own face. You'll hate your scar, not for being ugly but for healing faster than you, for letting everyone think you're doing so much better already. And when your healing suddenly halts, you'll hate that you've healed the wrong way. The lightning storms inside your scar will scare you enough to take most of your color. The stitch buried in your lip will fight its way out. Before it does, you'll think you're crazy because you can feel a stitch in there somewhere. When the first tiny blue thread breaks the surface you'll be fascinated, horrified, and justified and when you finally pull it out it will really hurt and then it all of a sudden it won't. The smallness of these things will make you feel pathetic while their immensity will exhaust you. All of this will make you thirst for more morphine, percocet, more distance from yourself, more fog. Healing is so ugly. More sleep, and then even more sleep. // Eventually, though you will start to ache for the water. You'll plot your return like you would to a lover and once at its edge, you'll let it tug at your heels while the tightness in your chest ebbs and flows with the tide. Standing there you'll long for a day when you might be able to remember that before the waves passed through you, you passed through them and felt whole.