Second surgery

There are so many 

people who have been taken away

in the middle of the night and

operated upon

high up in the sky.

So many of us

have felt themselves

opened up,

woken up to see

figures staring down at us,

eyeballing their work,

chattering amongst themselves,

discussing us like we are test subjects

animals soon to be vivisected:

cut open,

cut apart,

pieced back together,

closed back up,

and sent back down from the mothership

with who-knows-what removed,

and who-knows-what put inside.

No one knows where the scar on my chest came from.

My heart is strong.

My lungs are good,

and, yet, my chest has clearly been sawed open.

It feels like something is missing,

but I don’t know what isn’t there.

I know there had to be a time when I was whole,

when there was more to me

than there is now.

There has to be.

When people talk about abduction and forced surgery,

maybe they think about taking an arm off and a leg off

and reattaching them at opposite points,

or taking a hand off so it can be studied before reattaching.

I’ve always heard how complicated the hand is.

Maybe Saturday Night Wrist isn’t just about compressing the ulnar nerve,

maybe it is the arm coming off and the arm going back on.

Stranger things in this world.

Maybe something was taken out of my chest,

an unknown part of me excised like a tumour.

Maybe a memory or an emotion or a hint of spirit was taken away.

Or maybe I was just opened up

so the surgeons could see

what is inside me

and closed me back up 

when they didn’t find what they wanted.

I don’t know which of those things might be worse.

A lifetime of questions

and only one sad answer.

The only reason is

the reason didn’t apply to me.

That night of terror was just one of those things,

and one of those things in a universe of things is

the smallest thing one could be.