Touch the Hurt

What does it mean to hurt a wound? To place a heart every day for a year in memory of a murdered child. How can we comprehend a pain so deep, a bruise that refuses to heal?

Press your thumb into a bruise, and what do you find? Tiny wells of blood pooling from broken vessels, elegant oxygen in the red areas. Feel hemoglobin bobbing in cellular clots waiting for the body’s repair. Mend it if you can or break the vessel again—these subtle reinjuries.

Today, I touched the waist of a man in Gaza whose bits of torso and head were in a plastic bag. My phone’s screen did not flicker or shudder; there was no trembling in my hand. I touched his waist just below an empty, cotton belt loop, then slid my hand down to the heart just below the video on Instagram. The heart pooled red from broken vessels, ours, waiting for repair.

At this moment, this video on my social media feed has four thousand five hundred and thirty-six red hearts. If each of those hearts is a bruise and there’s a heart bruise for three hundred and sixty-five days, then we have almost one million seven hundred thousand places to touch the hurt. Enough blood in our hands to fill a chasm in a fault line. 

For one video by one person of a single murder on a single day, the equation is:

# of Heart-bruises x Time = The Hurt

Did you know there are sixty thousand miles of blood capillaries in a single body? So thin their walls, so permeable this single body stretching three times across the surface of the Earth.

This summer, I tried to heal a wound that was never bruised. A tenderness radiated where the tip of my gall bladder stems from under the liver. An old hurt, but not the oldest. I activated the energy in my palms by rubbing them together in circles, then laid a palm over the hurt. I touched it as an almost-touch, just inside an energy layer, nearly imperceptible to my senses. Breathing my attention to the pain, I wept a cry of unuttered loss. Every exhale a new layer of grief. Not a bruise, but a series of wounds stored in my body.

Two days before my forty-eighth birthday, I flush a heart red by a young man on a gurney waving his arms in the parking lot of a hospital in Gaza. His body, attached to an IV, is consumed by the searing heat of flames. His name, I will learn a day later, is Shaaban Al-Dalou and he could hear his mother nearby burning and dying. Attached to water, drowned by fire.

Shaaban is stored somewhere in the body of his father, who couldn’t reach him in the fire. Shaaban is held somewhere in the bodies of the children and adults who watched him burn.

Shaaban is held somewhere in the body of the person who recorded him burning.

Shaaban is held somewhere in my body, as I watch the tether of his IV respond to his arm flailing.

Shaaban is held somewhere in the bodies of the thousands of people who touched a heart red next to the video I saw of his burning body.

Shaaban is held somewhere in the bodies of the millions of people who viewed his death.

# of Heart-bruises x Time = The Hurt. Trillions of loops internally bleeding around the Earth.

To touch this planetary hurt requires a solar flare, heat strong enough to sear the body’s memory into illuminated truth. Almost no one can say the truth. I write a phrase, a murder. I pay my rent, a murder. I feed my cats, a murder. I teach students poetry, a murder. I vote, a murder.

Animals remind us to touch the hurt by licking their wounds. Licking is an instinct to cure, an instinct of connection. Saliva cleans the wound’s surface, preventing bacteria to infect.

To infect is to contaminate or morally corrupt. One letter away from inflect: to bend inward, to bow.

The tongue’s pressure on the wound staunches bleeding, causing hemoglobin to clot. Maybe licking the wound can reach the hurt?

Every hurt my cat Cielo receives, she licks the wound first. She twists her neck, produces saliva that covers her tongue, then rubs the coarse surface of her tongue along the pain. After a few licks, she seems to forget the hurt, as if it was made okay through her tongue’s touch. A dog will lick their owner’s wounds, an instinct to care for their pack. Mesopotamian goddess of healing, Bau, later named Gula, often appears in images with dogs and a scalpel, and is reported working with dogs in healing rituals.

If we can heal our surface wounds, are there limits to healing those that haunt the insides of our bodies?

A few years before touching the hurt at my gallbladder’s tip, I painted a star figure reaching up into a canopy of leaves nestled in the stars. A snowy owl appeared in the painting, so I used whites and browns and blacks to bring it to the surface. It had a message. Just after, the star figure’s legs became octopuses’ arms—eight black flailing arms with white suckers reaching to the canvas’s dimensional ledge. Reaching for the viewer or the painter? I still don’t know the difference. The star figure’s left arm reached down from the sky and touched the tip of the gall bladder. Stayed there all these years.

In European folk legend, there’s a saying to take a hair of the dog that bit you. These days, we understand this as a hangover remedy; that to cure a hangover, you should have another drink. But a deeper look into history shows us that placing a dog’s hair in its wound could heal the wound. Pliny the Elder suggested that if one is bitten by a rabid dog, one should place the ashes of the dog’s head directly into the wound. Perhaps placing death into the mouth of cause is healing? Perhaps I can name the wounds inside of me versions of death so I can move on from the wound?

I know what was in my gallbladder because I asked it. I laid my hand on the wound. Mixed my whole energy and the energy of any ancestor or spirit willing to help with the energy of the pain. I found there so much resentment, which comes from resentire: to re-feel; to feel again. Not anger. Not frustration or fear. But the feeling again and again of a hurt. The living wound had three layers, three distinct stories told in images and feelings. The top layer told a goodbye so deep I fell to the floor crying—a U-haul, a blood moon, a dragon on the wound. Below that, an inflammatory series of tiny hands covered in dust reaching from below rubble—hysterical mothers, dead mothers, metal tables lined with dead children, all linked somehow to a body, mine, that never seemed mine: Are you a boy? Are you a girl? The answer never existed, but I searched for it, and below that, the core wound, my mother slamming the screen against its hinges, asking if I wanted to see her in a wheelchair after the doctors cut off her legs, the endless spiraling of her schizophrenic mind.

Just above all of this is the tender place where energy hovers just above my material body. It is here where I call for an end to bombs that liquefy the earth, that liquefy the body, that set us on fire to each other and ourselves. I call for us to lick our wounds and lick each other’s wounds. To be like elephants, slathering our wounds in mud. To be any mammal’s mother and lick the wounds of those around us. This isn’t hard; this isn’t as hard as opening the belly of a plane and dropping a bomb that will crater the earth and crater the bodies of people flying kites.

These days, we refer to licking the wound as retreat, but let’s take it back. Let’s make it an offering of communal retreat away from the shaping of reality into pure, true, organic reality. Away from avoiding the hurt into touching the hurt.  

# of Touching the Hurt x Time = Collective Healing.

Collective healing is a revolution. A reality without racial-capitalism, genocide, policing. A reality of living wound to wound, caring for the earth and each other. This is how touch repairs the wound.