This is what it's like: the sweet clean smell of the operating theatre, where I'm dressed in pants 5 sizes too big for me and this wild hair is tucked under a colourful hat and I'm not sweating for the first time all day because this is the only place with air conditioning. I forgot to put my mask on and a nurse tells me off.
This is where you look pain in the face.
I'm confronted by the fact that we are cut apart so easily. I didn't want to know we weren't invincible but we are. Skin and bones. With souls. Someone tell me how that works?
Emmanuel got burnt because boiling water fell on him. Now he can't bend his elbow and the skin on his arm looks marbled. He is old enough to know what's going on and he looks around with big wild eyes, and struggles with the anaesthetist who is wearing a hat that says 'relax!' but I think about how it's in English and he won't know what that means.
Seeing the inside of someone's arm is surreal. I don't know what half of it means but I can see bones and tissue and muscle and fat. Not much fat on Emmanuel's little arms.
I take a photo and the scrub nurse laughs and says "I don't think his Mum will want to be seeing that!"
When did this become beautiful to me? This pain and ugliness - for something good. Skilled hands that know better than Emmanuel's every instinct that this is good. That the discomfort of the present comes right before restoration.
And it's beautiful.
