After the Curtain

A boy once told me I had the most beautiful hands he had ever seen. I had soap-pink nails and long, dainty fingers that painted flowers on my bedroom walls.

Now, I sleep with my hands between my legs because the pressure of both knees around them eases the joint pain wildfire that travels down my wrists. I still like soap-pink nail polish, but now my fingers cannot regulate temperature due to muscle waste, so sometimes they stiffen and freeze.

I spill my coffee routinely when it is cold outside.

I can’t lift my left pointer finger anymore. I just woke up one day and couldn’t. Progressive illness happens this way. The sick travels further while you sleep, eat dinner, read, make plans for tomorrow and next year. Then you wake up one day and the sick has arrived. It is slow and all at once. For a moment, it’s urgent, and you cry hot tears when you can’t button your shirt. But then you remember it was always on its way, and you’ve done this before with your toes and your ankles and your hearing in your left ear.

I am never not grieving.

I think about these things while I put on my best summer dress. It is silky black with white polka dots, ankle-length, no buttons.

I am in Boulder, Colorado, visiting my best friend of 11 years, getting ready to go out. Everyone around me is somehow the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, and they are all cyclists or pro climbers or just generally incredibly athletic. This makes me sick to my stomach with I-do-not-belong-here, so I put on my best summer dress for protection.

But I am still here, behind and between all the grief, I am here. And I’m in my polka dot dress, and I want to be noticed. There is lace and a bow on the neckline and everything. I wear perfume that I think says I am delicate and lovely; I can convince everyone in this room that I am delicate and lovely if I could just get through this god damn salad without crying.

And I’m humiliated, but the clasp on my bra is a little white heart, and it matches my dangly white heart earrings. Doesn't that count for something?

I’ve never been subdued in my emotions, so I am drunk off one Aperol spritz and let tears fall into my arugula (should’ve gotten the burger).

Most of all, I’m disgusted. With all of it, the lace and the powdery perfume and everything. I’m disgusted with how much I need to be seen. I’m trying to unlearn this, I swear I am, on my knees with my hands clasped and on my therapist’s teal couch.

Even as I write this, I’m embellishing the way some men write women. You know, “she was 107 pounds, beautiful but didn’t know, she did not sweat, and her body was completely hairless apart from the ever-presently styled hair on her head.”

There is a man inside me and a fucking bitch inside him telling me to get a lymphatic drainage massage and whateverthefuck else so I can rely on the tragically beautiful angle and never have to learn a healthier coping mechanism.

And it’s just self-defense until you’re building a weapon, right? (Knocked the wind out of me the first time I heard it, thank you Lorde.)

I used to get stopped in the street, offered dinner, or sometimes cash just to tell someone my name. I used to walk into bars as a 19-year-old knowing I would not be paying for a single thing that night. This felt like an accomplishment that I could return to when my well of self-worth was dry. External validation is a drug. And I always knew exactly how to get it. I knew I was a pretty crier, so I’d let just the right amount of sadness out to appear sweetly vulnerable but still sexy. Always hiding, never the full story.

I’ll let my mascara run, but only enough to make you want to hold me. Only a select few have ever made it past this black streak gate.

My disability becoming more visible has brought these dependencies to the surface. Using sexuality as armor allowed me to stay one layer removed at all times, for a long time, never having to be truly vulnerable or truly honest. Not with anyone, not with myself.

Ironically, being stripped of this tool because I am now perceived as disabled before anything else is the most naked I’ve ever felt.

But even as I’m carrying all of this around, I am so happy to be here. Could someone give me some credit for that? And even though this hurts and this is hard, I prefer it to feeling nothing. That bit I’ve already done.

I want to feel it all, so I don’t care that I’m crying into my salad, because my best friend is sitting across from me, and later we will laugh about how the couple next to us has been completely silent throughout dinner because they were tuned in to ours.

The title of this post is from a song I like, the main lyrics to which are “What can you do when the curtain falls?” I’ve always thought it felt like a letter to yourself in which you are asking, What will you do when you’re alone with just you? When no one is there to look, to clap? I’m projecting.

At the end of the night, I am standing on the street corner waiting for my friend to pull the car around. I see myself and my polka dots in the restaurant window’s reflection, standing next to my mobility aid, and I don’t hate what I see. I have only had a handful of moments like these since I started using an aid a year ago. And there, I feel just a little closer to who will emerge from all this unlearning.

I look forward to meeting her. Perhaps I’ll take her out for drinks, though I hear she’s kind of a lightweight.

Originally published by Olivia Longoria on Chronic Coping.