H.D.

Another creative writing ditty. (But not technically a ditty, I guess--something's wrong with the fact that words aren't as flexible as they should be.) A complete and utter rip-off of Robert Coover's "Fall Guy's Faith." I am well-aware of this and saddened by it, but what can poor, uninspired, amateur writers do in times like these, really?

He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone.

This was after the accident, of course. Before the accident, he’d been social as anything, chatty to a fault and boisterous too—always flailing about somewhere, committing petty and pointless theft, egging someone else on while they did something tasteless. He’d been recklessly alive, until one day he’d misjudged and leaned too far and—

So not now, not after that. Sure, they’d fixed him up as best they could, stitched together the loose ends of his physique, bandaged him up and sent him home with a slap on the (now-heavily-taped) back. Yet he’d felt a mysterious difference upon arriving home to his sagging couch cushions and his rumpled bed sheets, something not quite right but not quite touchable either.

He looked at his beat-up reflection the mirror every day now, and honestly it could just be that, just the mere act of self-recognition, the moment of identification: hello, yes, you are yourself, an instant all too striking for comfort—and plus he had never been asked by life to be conscious of himself before.

Or maybe it was the scar now running jagged across his face that forced him into something like remembrance. It was ugly, there was no denying that: violent and miscalculated the way that his fall from grace had been miscalculated. And now there was a centimeter-wide trail of pink flesh that cut into his stubble, where facial hair would not even grow. Raised flesh, and an angry tendency for his thoughts to run into each other and—through an act of inertia or near-inertia—tumble sideways and somersaulting away from him, off a mental cliff that he’d never realized the existence of before.

His girlfriend had even taken to tracing her fingers around that part of his face, avoiding the conversation while forcing them both into acute awareness of it.

Really, he convinced himself, it was just the residual weirdness of an all-too-weird situation.

And—“It’s not that I’m broken,” he said to the shrink he visited out of quiet desperation. “It’s not that. It’s just like I cracked before I even knew what was happening, and now I can’t seem to put myself right again.”