We hum and sing to heal, in the way we use the word to mean our insides warm and tingle out, onto the skin, as if our bones are wrapped with the kind of care we never were when we began, or else you wouldn’t be in this mess, maybe. 

I wrap my arms around my wide body as the woman outside the gym grills me about cancelling my membership, demanding answers. I’m sick, I say, offering up rare truth to this stranger, as if on my knees. 

With what?

One truth is never enough. 

My body is a broken wheel, missing spokes and making more when there were none. This will be more literal soon, in the future when disease spreads, when needles stop working and my intestines begin connecting, wheel to web. 

Joint pain spreads to its own rhythm, a side effect of medication to prevent ulcers riding wild, down each finger, around each wrist, and later down my chest wall, where I thought I cracked a rib from laughing.

Why are you even here if you didn’t fall, asks the radiographer, while my chest burned. 

A second truth, then. My mind is the web unraveling, thread by thread. Inside it is the sound of screaming, always a backdrop against the light outside. Medicine, again, prevents holes from being knocked into walls that look more solid than they are, yielding to a balled-up hand, in those moments a hammer. Can you hear me now, I wish I’d asked, then, body and brain howling, stretched in tableau. 

But have you tried it? That’s good for problems, says the dental hygienist after boring down and asking me what my list of medications was for. 

Naked, my skin falls away from my body in fat sheets. Bent into unusual angles, I beg for quiet, and it doesn’t come. Yes, of course I tried it. 

It is fine to start here, then, fine to cry that this body doesn’t have a suit to wear that fits. That this body is separate from me, contained somewhere else, in a world where my curves are flat, and there’s more of me in other places, but here I mouth my pronouns only to have them bounced back at me hard, as if I and they and them bang against a glass closet for the world to gawk at. If I looked like a blank slate, if only. 

In full view, then, but still invisible while the professional emails cycle. “It” is technically correct, but not politically correct, so I guess they/them is right, but what is this world coming to? 

Yes, what, as I noise and swing my aching body inside the transparency, begging to be heard and seen together. Oh, to come down, to have they and them wrap around me, strings of thick music from you.