In Pain, 7:02 a.m.

I am awake, briefly I hope, while the sky intensifies with navy and the last narcotic has worn down while the next pill digests inside my stomach.

In yesterday’s midafternoon, a surgeon lay me down on my side and surrounded my back with blue papery sheets. He cut into me around my shoulder blade, which I registered as an unsettling unfeeling after prick after prick of lidocaine had made me numb, mostly. I felt the tearing and what often seemed like ripping, imagined the thick of skin he had pulled away to cut beneath it, but it was the wandering drip of what I knew must be blood down under my armpit, curling onto my breast, that made me deeply uneasy, acutely attended to my mortality.

When the doctor was done, a nurse wiped away my upper back and allowed me to turn over a bit. I saw a C of dried brown blood matching the curve of my upper breast. Another nurse pointed to it for the first to wipe, and after he’d removed the arc without deleting its end point—a blackish drop—I felt repulsed and triumphant, both at once.