my right arm

I am in a bathrobe and coffee dregs and pondering the nature of a human body. I think I've learned a new secret. It's so simple, really.

I've been handling all business with my right arm very cautiously for the past nearly-a-decade because of a hard tumble I took in a state park with waterfalls one summer. The torn muscle didn't heal well and as a result, I always always carried my right arm with more deference than my left, and my range of motion was much less and much less certain. But I've recently been taught some things I should have always known, and like, like MAGIC I am better. I feel like there are so many just general principals of humanship I am missing, learning years too late if at all. I am just now figuring out what makes my body do this and that, what creates these sensations, what fills it up and what tears it down. It is so obvious to me now that to fix a limb held immobile by scar tissue and fear, you must force it to be mobile again.

Since the new year I've been learning to lift weights with my arms, learning to stretch them out and gradually reach farther and farther. This fixed me. And it's not even as if I noticed the healing taking place--I'm still dense enough to miss out on why I needed these things until the results were reached. But it worked like this: while I was strengthening the arm I was also busting up old scar tissue, deleting the clumped fascia that held my arm pinned in a half life. And it worked, and finally I have learned my lesson. So here it is: move.

My arm is stronger and so much more flexible than it was just months ago, and the kicker of it all is this healing that feels like magic, the way I can stretch and reach and pull things from the shelves without pain. I am 95% of a whole person. It's MOVING. MOVING.