“The phantom I had conjured up swiftly disappeared, but no spirit could have more amazed the man, so real did it seem.”—Silas Wier Mitchell, 1872
The phantom limb phenomenon is the delusional belief in the presence of an appendage that no longer exists. After a stroke, some patients experience the feeling of an extra limb, in addition to the regular set of two arms and legs. This perceptual distortion is called supernumerary phantom limb*.
From a neurological standpoint, it is easier to understand the limitations ensued by damage to the brain than it is to explain how brain damage can create a positive symptom, such as false perception. However, from a certain philosophical standpoint, there is no such thing; all perception is false perception. The truth resides beyond space and time, and all we can tangibly get are imitations of transcendental ideas, transitory effigies of eternal structures used to make sense of the things we cannot see, but we know exist.
There’s a story about the origin of love that says human beings were once rounded, symmetrical wholes. From each body protruded two sets of arms, two sets of legs, and a cylindrical neck, topped by one head, with two faces, one peering out from either side. They were united, until they scaled the heavens and challenged the gods. Zeus hurled his lightening bolts down to punish them for such treason, and these prelapsarian people were split into the tragic, two-legged creatures that Matt and I are today. We’re reeling from the pain of being divided, and trying to get back to what we used to be.
Erich Maria Remarque describes the atrocities of trench warfare in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. Standing at the bedside of his severely injured friend, Franz Kemmerich, Albert Kropp asks, “How goes it, Franz?”
“Not so bad,” Franz replies, “but I have such a damn pain in my foot.” The leg had been amputated. I’m not in the trenches, but at the kitchen sink, and this is not a house, but a cave, where the walls are cast with shadows of the love we always wanted. But what is love? Some say it’s the desire to possess beauty, others say it’s the possession of beauty, but I think it’s found somewhere in between, sandwiched between here and the stars.
My marriage ended with a blow to the head—my head. Matt threw the punch. I called the cops. Matt went to jail. We got divorced. Two years later, he proposed a reunion, and I moved back into the house lined with rose bushes. Sometimes, I find myself talking to the trinkets on the sill above the kitchen sink, a motley menagerie of plastic alligators, ceramic donkeys, and glass swans, trying to figure things out. I am the only speaker at this strange symposium. “We used to be one,” I tell them, “but now we are two.” We once thought we would die in this house, but it seems a part of us jumped the gun, and left here long ago. Now that it’s gone, we don’t know who we are anymore. We’re stuck here, for better or worse, haunted by the ghost of what might have been.
In another universe, there’s a version of me that keeps the house clean. She rests her wedding band on a pedastal, a bronze ring holder shaped like a hedgehog, while she tends the dishes. The job is finished when the last saucepan is wiped dry and hung from an ornate pot rack Matt installed just weeks after the wedding. This version of me arranges the trinkets on the window sill above the kitchen sink, alone in the Pine-Sol scented air, as Matt reads our son a bedtime story in another room across the house.
There’s a red Samsonite suitcase sitting in a closet in a parallel dimension. It stays there, save for two weeks per year, when a diverging, happy copy of Matt and Cassidy take it out, and travel the world together. There are pictures of us against backdrops of the Egyptian pyramids and the Eiffel Tower. In this alternate reality, I took Matt back to where I grew up in northern California. There, I showed him the Redwood National Forest and helped him build a fire on the beach. I wrote his name in the sand, then went home, unpacked, and put our suitcases away.
But not this version of Matt and Cassidy; we don’t go on vacation. The only place for us is the house lined with rose bushes. If I leave, I can leave it all here. I can take the red Samsonite suitcase out of the hall closet, never return, and create an effigy to our love in my wake. If I can’t make it work, then I’ll at least make a tombstone.
These days, the air is so thick with smoke, you can almost chew it. I smoke. Matt smokes. We didn’t always smoke in the house, but at some point, Matt stopped caring, and lit up. I stopped caring, and dimmed the lights to hide the dirt. We don’t have children, and the only dishes we have are dishes yet to be broken. The pot rack sits atop the water heater in the corner; Matt says he’ll get to hanging it eventually. My little bronze hedgehog is now an ashtray, the wedding bands long since hocked for cash, and here I am, reaching for another smoke, always under the watchful eye of the motley menagerie.
Do-overs are like unicorns; they don’t exist. The best I can do sometimes is stare as hard as I can at a horse’s head, until I think I see a horn. I think that if I love Matt enough, I can raise the dead, but maybe love isn’t about resurrection at all, but about creating something out of nothing. Zeus didn’t make way for love by causing pain. Maybe he just created lunatics, fractured by divine will. We were knocking on heaven’s door before we were divided, and we’re still knocking.
I hope that there is such a thing as a parallel universe, where Matt and I are together, snuggling, playing, loving, and having kids—but not this version of Matt and me, not in this lifetime, and not in this universe. But if not us, who will live in the house lined with rose bushes? Our memory. That’s who. So, upon my death and the rifling through of my possessions, there will be no sappy poetry, no journals of hopeful numerology, and no cheap photography—just a small box, and inside a motley menagerie of plastic alligators, ceramic donkeys, glass swans, and one empty bronze ring holder, shaped like a hedgehog. I’ll be long gone, beyond the planets and the stars, where there are no more shadows.
*Weeks, Sharon R., and Jack W. Tsao. “Incorporation Of Another Person’s Limb Into Body Image Relieves Phantom Limb Pain: A Case Study.” Neurocase (Psychology Press) 16.6 (2010): 461-465. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec. 2012.