I've had a litany of operations
in my life, but only one started with the carving of a lamb roast.
Sunday afternoon and not much was
happening but for the smell of roasting flesh filling the kitchen, lounge,
dining room, bedrooms, laundry, tightly woven plaits, shower stall and memories.
The brown, sizzling leg was proudly laid on the kitchen bench and I innocently
hovered over it with a gigantic kitchen knife.
Some may begin to think that in
the not too distant future of this story my clean, youthful blood would be
raining down upon our carefully prepared lunch and flowing like murderous, oozing
icing on a Halloween cake - unfortunately not.
I tentatively and gently
approached, setting out to glide the knife across the meat. In a fit of
resistance the lamb leg flung a piece of itself at me, or so I thought, and
landed right in my eye socket.
A quick dash to the bathroom was
followed by useless poking around at my eyeball, trying to move it out of the
way of my eye socket so as to recover the offending article. What I found was a
small, firm piece of white material that I presumed was a little ball of baaaah
fat. I tried to gouge it out with my fingernail but it held firm.
I staggered out to the kitchen,
eyes bloodshot with distress, to declare my predicament. Once the remainder of
the household had finished their own poking around it was decided that I ought
to see a doctor.
A few days later, and after much
more poking around, it was decided that this was a piece of the remainder of my
identical twin who died a wee pea in the womb… obviously. I was startled,
surgery was booked and before long I was flat on my back on a theatre table,
wide awake, with a huge syringe heading for my eye socket twin. The last
remaining speckle of her life was about to be wiped out.
As I lay on the table, conscious
and awake, after being stabbed in the back of the eye with a needle, the
surgeon began scraping around to cut it out. After one broken scalpel and
almost cutting off the circulation in the attending nurse’s hand, my twin’s attempt
at re-birthing was finally thwarted.
And so the theory goes that when
I was conceived so was a copy of me, that she didn't have the gung ho attitude required
to birth into a world where having smooth skin and a fancy car was more
important than integrity and spirituality and, as a result, jumped ship. So I
am told, as her body decomposed in our shared bath my body absorbed a bit of
her bits and, thus, I became a host to her ambivalent quest for life.
Since then I've had two different
coloured eyes so I can only imagine that her ghost lives on in me. As such, I
now wish to declare that for everything I've ever done wrong…IT WAS HER!
Happy Mother’s Day
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