changes without change

a love letter to my splinter

I wake up and it’s one of those days that it almost feels as if I can see the walls moving. As if I am experiencing the slow gravitational pull of the earth in real time, the centrifugal force moving my house in circles, whilst I stay fixed. I think about the splinter that’s been sitting in my calf for almost three days now, the small fleck of wood lodged so deeply in my leg that even after we spent an hour trying to draw it out with internet remedies all that we managed to pull outwards was a crimson pool of blood. Sometimes the body will reject them by itself, forming a little pimple at the surface which slowly drains over time. Sometimes, the material dissolves, and breaks down into microscopic fragments which over time digest and become a part of the body. Sometimes, when left untreated, splinters can lead to ongoing inflammation, granuloma formation, and at worst, infection of the blood. The body can’t always remove foreign objects on it’s own.

I’ve been picking at my skin again, but worse this time. I said I wouldn’t, then I did. The red abrasions on my forehead where my blood vessels siphoned off an amalgamation of platelets and red blood cells leave small openings for microbes and oils, refilling, bursting, scarring, repeating. My hedonistic form of self destruction, pulling myself apart at the surface. Cutting in to open wounds, neutrophils and macrophages arriving at the same site of dead tissue, again and again, no repair. A nasty habit that I never could change. Like a doting lover that silently watches in horror as their partner bursts into the flames of self immolation. Like playing hide and seek and then you laugh, giving yourself away. Like a snake that eats its own tail. An internal network of organs and blood that slowly fails itself. I feel like I could give you everything without giving myself away. I feel like I give you everything, and I give myself away. A silent transition into dirt and dust. Eyes flared, breath quickening, gums showing, teeth snarled, a dark and viscous liquid drips off the sticky cavity of open mouth. You hold me as we watch with knowing resignation, my body devouring itself alive.

My new dust self is only an exterior, a hollow shell. I trace my hands against your back but I don’t think you can feel them. When you enter me I scream, but no sounds come out. I don’t recognise myself in the mirror anymore. My body is contorted and bent out of shape. My skin is falling off of my face. I become transfixed with the low hum of the world that is really just passing cars on the freeway. I masturbate and never climax. I eventually forget the sound of my own voice. Is this what it feels like to die?

My body is an unrecognisable form, and it fails me now, just like your father’s. Just over 6 months ago now he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a rare degenerative condition that attacks the body’s executive functions. Last week you cried in my arms when his voice deteriorated into nothing but a faint whisper. This week there was blood on your hands when you cleaned the point of entry for the feeding tube they just installed. It doesn’t make sense, to see life fall away from it’s bones like this. Like the riddle written on the black board at that cafe we went to on Friday that I never could solve.

MND is always progressive, with no periods of remission. A car that you get in that never stops driving. A bite of food you take that you chew on forever. A wound that never grows over into a scar. A song that never stops playing. A shape that never reduces in size or form. You leave your home one day and you are walking for the rest of your life. Not only does the disease affect the physical aspects of your world, but also the behavioural ones. In about 15% of cases, people with MND will develop fronto-temporal dementia which presents additional challenging neurobehavioral symptoms for family including; irritability, impulsivity, loss of insight, self-centeredness and lack of empathy. At the end of life, as family and caregivers lose the ability to interact with their loved ones, they also lose the ability to understand them. It strips you of your humanity, your texture, your colour. You submit to the reality that the only way to take care of yourself is by virtue of another’s action. Your entire existence reduced to dependence. It is in these moments that we are forced to come to appreciate the pleasure of obligation…the pleasure of ordinary devotion (Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, 2015). To depend on someone else, is to love. To ask for love, is to love. Because the self without attachments is not a self at all, and a relationship without dependance is not relational by any means. Dependence is often scorned even in intimate relationships - that between your brother, your Mum, your Dad. As if dependence by some definition is incompatible with self reliance, despite it being the only thing that makes it possible (Taylor, On Kindness, 2009). Your Dad still wants to light the fire outside on his own. Wants the autonomy to stand on his own two feet, uninterrupted. Wants to hold his own space. He, just as you do, struggles to let go of his body.

I dig deeper and deeper into my skin for the splinter. I dig so far I start to see the beginning of hair follicles in my dermis layer. I wonder of my langerhans cells have begun the process of detecting and responding to the foreign object that pierced through my skin almost four days ago now. I wonder if by cutting through the scab I’m just letting everything in again. I wonder if I’m opening myself up in the right way, the wrong way. I can’t quite tell yet if it hurts.

I ask you what it feels like to be falling in love with someone new whilst simultaneously beginning the process of grieving somebody you love. You say it’s interesting, then don’t explain. The “goodnight, I love you” that you say to him echoes through the hall where I sit on the other side of the wall, alone, in the darkness of the night that follows the first time I ever met your extended family. Goodnight, I love you, I whisper to you right before we fall asleep. Attempting to articulate the meaning of love is like trying to describe a sunset or explain a smell (Vanishing Points, 2025). Configurations of feeling are not carried by words alone (Highmore, 2016), and the way we fall in love is the perfect example of this. The material world of things undergoes all sorts of reaccentuation and reattunement, a process which is shaped by how we relate to the immaterial qualities and contexts of the spaces around us. With each day, comes a redefinition, new structures of feeling (Williams, preface to film, 1954). A world between us that exists only intangibly. I can never grasp how I feel, but I will always have a way of knowing.

I can never grasp how it feels to watch you lose him, but I will always have a way of knowing. For me to say I love you, and for it to mean something different every time. For it to develop, bend, stretch and warp as we melt inwards with each other, or sometimes drift apart. No matter the space between us, there will always be a tether of love.