Post-Surgery Exposure to Wind and Water

by TYLER ORION

I open my mouth and usher the wind into my body. I hear the air echoing down my lungs. For a moment, I am the organ pipes played by an invisible force. I am hollow.

Under the sweeping reach of hemlock branches, I stand in the shadows looking out over the lake’s inlet, hemmed in by steep hills that rise up from the water, densely shrouded in pines, birches, and maples. All around me, the deep gulping cacophony of bullfrogs. Down the narrow strip of a beach, groups gather, kids pushing each other around in the sand while adults watch from under umbrellas, beer cans sweating in their hands. I taste pollen and the sudden rise of summer.

When I press my hands against my chest, I feel, through the thin cotton, the sore ridge of scar tissue in two long, horizontal lines under my pecs, ending under my armpits. A year after my top surgery, there are places where the scars have smoothed into the surrounding skin and I can hardly feel any deviation. But where the lines almost touch in the center of my chest, just over my sternum, I can feel where the stitches were uneven and left slight crinkles in the seams of skin.

Under my shirt, my chest is pale white, not only from seven months of winter, but from a lifetime of adhering to the requirement that I cover my chest in public. Breasts remain concealed. When I take off my T-shirt for the first time around strangers, I won’t need to feel ashamed. Because my skin does not protrude anymore, because I chose to eliminate the protrusions, I’m now allowed to remove my shirt. I watch the men around me remove theirs. They don’t think about this action, one they have done their whole lives with ease. Some have muscle definition and others are chubby, some hairy and some smooth, but all are long trained that being shirtless is a natural and acceptable part of maleness. I, too, can now claim this freedom, but I’m still learning how.

Hesitantly, I take off my shirt. I feel the wind swimming around my naked chest, licking at my scars, my lumpy, slightly skewed nipples, across the ticklish skin under my arms. The wind takes all of me, pushes against every part evenly, doesn’t care which parts have been left undamaged and which have been sliced and sewn. The wind has no opinion of me aside from being another physical obstacle to thrust against, another object in space: skin and bones, pines, stones. For a moment, I feel neutralized within myself, like everything has come into balance inside. For a moment, I touch the border between surrender and acceptance.

But as I head toward the water, walking from the shade into the sun, I feel momentarily like my scars are lit up like electric signs pointing to my inferiority, pointing to my inability to accept the body I have been given without cutting parts off and adding parts on. I look around like I’m getting away with something that I shouldn’t be doing. I am embarrassed about my body and how the story of my identity can be read clearly by the lines across my chest. How I am trying to belong, but really, I don’t belong at all. I’ve kept myself invisible all of my life, but now I feel like that survival tactic has been stripped from me.

Yet, no one notices me. I’m grateful there aren’t many people around—I’m easing myself into this new sense of appropriate nakedness. The water is still cold from a long Vermont winter. Arms wrapped around my chest, covering up my shame, I submerge my feet and pause, adjusting to the temperature that’s just shy of bitter, before slowly moving deeper. As my knees disappear under the water, I breath the cold in, sinking into a deep, inner quiet, and, tentatively, I touch on a rising feeling that possibly I might love this new freedom, that it might be a reward for all the years I fought to survive. I’m afraid of my happiness. I’ve never known how it feels to be aligned in my body. I’ve only known discomfort. When that begins to dissipate, how will I learn to be at home within myself?

I let my arms fall to my sides. Reminding myself to breathe, because I know I’m holding my breath, I feel exposed. Yet, just for a minute, I don’t care what people think. It took everything I had to get myself to this moment. The fact that I’m here at all reinforces my will to not only survive in the darkness, but to let some light in. Opening my mouth, I feel sun in my lungs, heat on my tongue. Light ebbs into all the shadowed crevices of my body. I am illuminated.

This is my first time swimming since surgery a year ago. Feeling the pressure of water against my skin is one of my favorite sensations. Like the wind, water gulps at all of me, tasting every surface of my body, welcoming me into the cold murk. When I dive under, my naked chest feels like skin long held by a bandage and now free. Every cell seems to leap outward, my skin eager to converse with the water. I used to love swimming because I didn’t feel the weight of my breasts in the water. They floated, weightless, when I swam naked, or were pressed tight by a bathing suit into my chest. Now, I can love swimming because I not only don’t feel their weight, but they aren’t there at all.

I lean back and let myself float, eyes closed against the sun’s glare, arms and legs spread wide. Wind and water. All the noise of the people dissipates, everything vanishes except for my body suspended, buoyant. All of the destructive thoughts that I flog myself with, all the shame and fear, all the fight is blown away, just for the moment. Water and wind. I feel held as I have never felt held before.