XLI.

Rock, burr, shard, I have stepped on many things where I saw
only dirt, then panged alert, lifted a bare sole to find blood
beading. This time softness startled me into balancing on one leg
to watch what was already red, a velvet ant, continue its solitary
journey. This preservation was so incidental, a hair’s breadth
fluke, that for the first time I believed the architecture of my foot
was no accident but something predestined. Where my flesh is not
holds the same capacity for intimacy as where my flesh is. Today
the absence of my body made safe passage, an underpass for
the universe. Now even my breath is arched as if I can have faith
that at least occasionally my bones will rise and fall in ways not
unkind but rather attentive to needs other than my own, attentive
to my need to make space for the world around me, to make places
on my body receptive to the lightest touch, the smallest pleasure.

From Red as a Lotus by Lisa Gill
http://www.lisagill.org/