My friends and I found ourselves on the beach, recently, with nothing but a phone camera, a shitty wig, and a goal to shoot a music video. I revelled in the childlike joy– running around the dunes, tossing a bag between one another, yelling at each other over the roaring winds. I had decided to run down the dune one last time, spreading my arms and feeling the rush take me. Until I jumped off a dune, and my leg bent and warped to the side, sending me tumbling face first into the sand.
I sat there, clutching my knee, no tears making their way out of my eyes, but the pain overtaking my senses. I could feel it in my mouth; biting down on it tasted like gunmetal and salty illness, wobbling through the atoms of my being.
For the greatest majority of my life thus far, I believed all I had, at the ends of the roads, when I was breathless and all my muscles were burning with overuse, was my body. My body, which I had tried to nurture, my body I had been told was broken, my body which had taken my evenings and mornings and days to hospitals and urgent cares and doctors, my body which had failed me. The body I had grown to resent, a body I scarred and cursed. My body was all I would ever have.
What I failed to understand, through the sleepless nights and the angst and the yearning, was that human beings consist not only of our bodies, but of our souls. Bodies are foundational; if you care for them, your soul has an opportunity to thrive. But even in a home without a door, someone can fill the kitchen with the smells of a home-cooked meal. Souls do not wait for the body to catch up; they simply do as is natural. Even in ruins, souls continue to connect and love with one another.
As I sat, swishing water in my mouth to get rid of the grit of the sand, leg throbbing, my friends began to laugh with me, gathering around me, helping me shift my weight, stand, be a human again. And even with the failure of my body, the twisting and warping of my limb I had come to rely on, my soul did not falter. At the ends of the roads, your body may tire, but your soul– it glows.