I was still here when they scattered pieces of me everywhere. Before the separation occurred, my being injected life back into anything it could find. It didn’t differentiate between potential life and lack of it; whatever it could reach for, it clung to, and it didn’t let go. It snuck between the layers of muscle fibers connecting my limbs. It recoiled as my movements became nothing more than electrical misfires. It hardly reacted as I exploded on impact, reducing mounds of adipose tissue to starbursts of gunk on asphalt. It stuck in earnest to the shoulder joint tethered by tendon and sinew. It spilled out with my stomach content in the acrid smell of apple pie. It was the nail that hung by a thread of skin. It was the flesh that lingered on granules of gravel. It was every bit of me that was ever me that continued to be me, even as it was spread across a thirty-foot stretch of highway. So as long as life still flowed through me- any piece of me- so would my soul remain on Earth, still fleshy and beating.
Then, once the blinding white pain gave way to euphoria, and the ambulance sirens started screaming, my remaining consciousness cascaded out of my ear canal and trickled down my spine. It collected in my helmet, a soup of cerebral fluid, where hair tacked to the base of my flopping neck. It carried my breath away, restored only by the plastic tube that parted my laryngeal folds, working past my crushed windpipe. A gurgle. More globules of blood and saliva spilling down my chin, even the lubrication tinted red. Red. The color of the heart absent from laminated plastic. The sign of approval to remove mine.
They rolled me through an operating theater several hours later, the gurney disappearing under a swarm of nurses and consenting signatures. A human compulsion initially prevented me from passing through those doors, but to what degree was I human anymore, having been reduced to shattered femurs and severed nerves? I slipped intangibly inside.
Hands gloved in vinyl writhed around my abdominal cavity, and my intestines were on display to the world. I stood above myself in agony at witnessing my demise, anguished as they cracked what remained of my ribs for better access, sick as they saved my squishy insides swimming in blood. It was terror, watching as they snipped and scissored and slit and took and took and took and took until they set their scalpelled sights on my heart. Steady hands. Steady slicing. Steady separation. Steadily gone.
Once I woke up again, I was back in a hospital corridor. Though thick was the disorientation that plagued me, I recognized this as the hall leading up to the ICU, where I was just hours earlier. Eerily, everything decided to forego volume. A world on mute, that’s what I called it, greeted me with its solitude. Not even my own footfalls made a sound anymore.
In the distance, though, a beacon of auditory hope emerged: intermittent beeping, accompanied by a familiarity I recognized. The steady pattern compelled me to follow. I listened, and it pulled me, and it led.
The feeling bought me to several supine figures lying behind a wall of glass. As if it weren’t there, I phased through it towards the one that called me. There was no confirmation needed from a chart at the edge of the bed, or a peak at the festering wound wound tightly under wraps; I knew there was a piece of me in there, and for it I was longing.
My mind churned through a slurry of thoughts. Even after seeing myself splayed across the operating table, I still couldn’t fathom that it happened to me again: my body, mine no more, reduced without permission to its utility. I didn’t care how many vessels they split me across or how many places they inserted my parts: they were still mine. They may be elsewhere now, but it was still me.
Time became a viscous liquid that only further confused me. Every time I’d blink, I was greeted with someplace new, and became acquainted with the bodies and walls that confined me. Four hospitals tugged me in either direction; sometimes after a few hours, sometimes after a few days. I was a witness to every critical event: every episode of sweat and stirring; every soiled hospital linen; every digit working itself into responsiveness. There I saw myself in vases of flowers, replaced once they outlived their usefulness, leaving behind shriveled traces of itself on nightstands.
In moments of inactivity, when the celestial bodies and monitoring screens would cast a dim light across their faces, I studied them closely by their bedsides. I committed to memory every name and emergency contact and medical entry and medication to remedy whatever condition they had until the information oozed out of my ears, and then reread it again for confirmation. They had lives outside these sterilized environments, lives they could get back to now that they had a chance to live it. They could return to families welcoming them with made-up beds, and commutes they used to frequent to doctor’s offices.
They didn’t ask to die. I knew that rationally. I knew all that and more, but no matter how much I tried or how much I wanted to, I still couldn’t shake the bitter envy. No matter what soul was in control of that organic machine, all I could see were pieces of me, and a life deferred indefinitely. I was their extension. Selfishly, I wished I weren’t.
How many breaths had he stolen with my lungs? How much waste was left to filter with my remaining kidney? I wondered how my skin fit so easily over limbs licked by flames.
How much richer was color when perceived with my corneas? How easily would sobriety be vanquished with my liver lengthening his lifespan? How differently was love felt in comparison to my heart?
The clenching in my chest never got better. I stewed in the misery at the sight of familial affection and get well cards from visitors, and as the hands rounded the circumference of the clock, my bitterness and sorrow only grew. After only a few months, I couldn’t handle the idea of lamenting a life lost for several decades, especially when I was forced to watch time that should’ve been mine.
One day, I wandered away from one of my donors and sat under the canopy of a willow. My hearing only responded to whatever was close to my borrowed organ, so my ears were faintly ringing with shrieks of glee. It was made by the one with my kidney: a little girl, and she made her parents give chase to her newly recovered form. In energetic bursts, she ducked and dove, and her parents purposefully lagged just enough for her to sprint by. Every time they reached for her, she’d scream, and her ponytail snapped in a different direction. From the back, her straw-dry hair reminded me of my sister.
The last time I ever saw my family was in a bereavement room, the sight of my elder sister cradled in our parents’ arms. My mother’s inflamed sclera. The weeping sinuses of my father’s nose. My sister wore a turquoise sweater I had never seen before. She must have bought it after moving away.
A surgeon, the same one who would later repurpose my insides, entered with a stack of papers and a somber pinch of his brow. As a bearer of bad news, he was deliberate in his choice of words. He explained the concept of brain death, how the collision snapped my neck on impact, that it was best to say goodbye. Then, more delicately, he mentioned my status on the organ donation registry. My adamant refusal was on file, but given my history of it, surely I’d understand, so he sought permission from those who would grant it.
My parents turned to each other, and with a brief glimpse into the other’s eyes, nary a tear yet dried, they voiced their approval.
It wasn’t long before my sister’s wailing turned to rage, and my parents quickly ushered the physician out of the room before she could reach him. She was livid at the suggestion, and it gave her strength to stand- until the door was closed, that is, at which point she fell back in her chair, silently crying.
I stood there for a moment, watching as her ragged breaths warped the wool around her ribcage. Cerulean rosary beads swung from her clenched fist like a metronome.
My former kidney beckoned me closer. I sat down next to my sister in the hard adjoining chair, although “hardness” was not a sensation I readily recalled anymore. The erratic vibrations of her pounding heart rattled around in my head. I watched as she stared holes into the linoleum floors, still hunched over with folded hands.
“You were more than that to me,” she whispered, wavering with tears. “You always were. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t make any further adjustments, and sat there in silence. If she eventually went to the room that harbored my body, then I wouldn’t know, because time pulled me somewhere else not long after.
Despite my sister harboring my other kidney, my circulation cycle never brought me back to her again. It only happened the once, perhaps by chance on account of her proximity to me. Maybe time lessened the bond of ownership as the calendar lost pages. Maybe twelve years was too far removed to still be recognized as mine.
Perhaps this was my sole purpose in life, to extend the existence of others, and here was my legacy fulfilled. My sister knew the circumstances of my birth, perhaps more intimately than I did. After all, I was conceived especially for her: a vital gift to prolong the present, and beneath the colorful exterior, a broad spectrum of spare parts. I was never intended to be my own being. I was merely a means to mend things of more value.
The girl’s father eventually caught her, gathering her up in his arms with a twirl. They clambered back to their picnic site, a blanket and spread of sandwiches laid out by the mother, all in spite of the baby strapped to the front of her. The girl spit lettuce everywhere while blabbering between bites, wiggling the toes of her sibling, a baby girl.
I wondered, before my passing intervened, if she was conceived just like me. Who has a child when their current one is dying? Was this for want of another, or for more time with the first? When she grew old enough and sick enough, would they explain why she got a new sister, what having someone so genetically similar could mean? Would they help the youngest one understand what “organ donation” meant, even though an eight-year-old had no concept of coercion? Would she be loved afterwards or as an afterthought, only when more flesh needed harvesting?
I sat in the shade for what felt like an eternity. They laughed as if they hadn’t a care in the world. How eagerly they could create a child with a sole purpose; how selfishly they could birth their savior.
The baby cooed and grabbed a handful of blades of grass, blissfully unaware of the opportunists surrounding her. Here was progeny who would never know the reason for her creation, who would never know a knife or be burdened as her sister’s only hope, who couldn’t be signed away with parental consent. She who would live with the illusion of autonomy, whose being belonged to her and her alone.
If this was the fate I were subjected to, if I was truly stuck here for the rest of their lives, then maybe I could find contentment in it one day. If not through acceptance, then perhaps vicariously. Maybe that was the life I was set to live. Maybe I was meant to be scattered.
HAPPY 