Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, that’s what they say is killing me. But that’s just the shit I have to deal with, same as everyone else. The shit that makes me, me.
What’s really killing me, plain and simple, is Diane.
You see, I love Diane. Love, love.
And she loves me too. You’d have to really love someone to stay with them when they have knots of bone growing like doorknobs in their muscle, when any little break or tear will cause a flare up and then my muscle, it doesn’t scar like yours does – my muscle turns into bone.
Muscle, tendon, it’s all up for grabs.
I met Diane in the waiting room of a hospital after I fell down the stairs. A little thing like that, something you’d probably shake off, and I’m in the hospital. My wrist turned when I fell, and bone grew in place of the tendons that wrap their way over my wrist. I was lucky, though, because I got to meet her and all it cost me was my hand.
You see, Diane, you can’t explain her. I can tell you about her free spirit. I can tell you that she has a hummingbird for a heart and she flutters wherever she goes. I can tell you that she’s beautiful, but that doesn’t cut it.
I can’t describe what’s it like to be around her, to feel like I’m not growing my own coffin around my body.
Diane, I heard her voice for the first time that day in the hospital waiting room and I was free. I met Diane and I started smiling.
When Diane is around, there’s nothing wrong with me. When she’s around, I can dance and jump and grow feathers from my fingertips.
And that, circling back, is what’s killing me.
It’s not the time she hugged me too hard and I grew extra bones around my ribs. It’s not the knots of bone built up from the time I walked her inside after our third dates, kissed her on her front steps like you or anyone else would their girl, and twisted my ankle.
It’s that I love her so much none of that matters. It’s that when she smiles I have no limitations.
When I asked her why she loved me, later, after she’d said it a thousand times, she said that I really saw her. I saw her for her. In the waiting room, after I’d stumbled into the burn ward by accident, I saw Diane and not her body. And with me she saw herself again, she said.
And I guess that makes sense, even though she’s beautiful. Everyone’s insecure about something.
And that kills me too, the way she sees herself. The way I imagine I won’t always be around to tell her how beautiful she is. The way I won’t always be around to hold her tiny, fused hand.
So there’s some grace in my illness, knowing that I’m turning to stone. Even though I won’t always be here for her, every wound is just another addition, encasing my heart to beat forever in the human sized locket I’ll leave behind.
Jeremy Bronaugh is the author of the novel When You Bleed to Death (Hypertrophic Press, 2014). He lives in Huntsville, Alabama.
