Friday, January 22, 2010

January 22, 2010

I was probably eight years old. I was with my family at my uncle Jonathan's house. His wife, my aunt, is Terry, and their daughters are Hillary and Charlotte. They still all exist and relate to me in the same way. We're all still the same number of years apart.

We were having a barbeque or something there. There is their house. It was in New Braunfels. I honestly don't know what to say if you ask if they still live there now. They are a diaspora across the Southwestern part of the United States. Terry spends most, if not all her time in Taos, New Mexico. Jonathan spends his days between Taos, New Mexico, New Braunfels, and San Antonio, Texas, where he visits my mother, his sister, and uncle Andy, his brother by blood. The two girls are or have been, depending on the case and when you're reading this communique, living in Austin, though both have spent time bebopping around the globe.

At the time, they lived there in New Braunfels, and I lived with my family (ma, pa, bro) in San Antonio. Any exploration of their diasporic migration will be saved for later.

We were visiting. We were eating. I was running. Running, I shuffled across the wrong board of the deck with no shoes on. I was penetrated through the bottom of my foot by a splinter about an inch long. If you need to know how long an inch is, you can imagine huge for a splinter or about the distance that spans the two middle knuckles on your pointer finger (for average-sized adults) or middle finger (for smaller adults or children). It's 2.54 centimeters for those of you who...well, I won't even say it. Just 2.54. Trust me.

Regardless, the beast of a splinter entered me rudely and without warning. I found myself shrieking and bleeding all over the deck. We attempted to remove the foreign object with tweezers. Failure found us.

I went to the doc-in-a-box, which is to say general practitioner. He cut my skin extending out along cardinal directions, using the entry point as the origin. He removed the splinter. My brother nearly vomited and fainted upon seeing the blood, or was it the iodine? Either way, it made him queasy and he left the room no worse for wear.

The scar, naturally, healed like a cross shape. I remember, at the time, thinking that I probably should believe in the Christian God, or at least say and hope I did. The cross scar told me that I was forever connected to God's existence. More recently, I have noticed the thing disappear. Wonder what that means about my God connection.

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