My Missing Leg

Legs leave footprints where ever they tread.

When I was just a child, one of my legs was surgically removed. Like many who experience such a loss, I too, continued on my journey through life despite my handicap. In fact, with time it was all that I knew. It became my reality to such depth that I was no longer even conscious on a daily basis of my missing leg. I was no longer aware of the curve in my spine from putting all of my weight on one leg while standing. Most of all, I was completely unconscious of how I would position my body to make sure that people would not notice my empty space. Especially whenever a camera came out, making something as permanent as a photograph, I would hide it so that I would not have to see my empty space. This did not prevent me from being happy. Without a doubt, it compounded life's normal difficulties, and yet, I had an uncanny ability to lighten my mood, in no time at all, with such things as music. This worked very well for me, or at least I thought it did, until one day when my leg returned...

I was surprised that my leg had not died! I would have expected the doctors to have disposed of it. With this realization, my first thought was to wonder why my leg had stayed away for so very long. It made me feel very unimportant no matter how my leg tried to express that I was missed. I was in fact overjoyed to see my leg again, but my happiness was masked by my reaction to being confronted with this validation of my empty space. Aware now of this space, I was challenged to know what to do with this leg that I had been forced to learn to live without. I had always harbored fantasies that my leg would return and reattach itself to me, but, here it was after so much time that the wound had had time to heal over. Reattachment would be possible if the wound was fresh, but little is known of the methods of reattachment after too much time. Though time can be a great healer, this is not always the truth. Time also allows decomposition or growth in different directions. As much as I wanted to try to reattach my leg, I also feared it leaving me again after I readjusted to walking with two legs. I did not have a solid base of trust to begin with and this would require trust. Unlike in fantasies, in reality, separate lives and time get in the way.

To my dismay, when my leg and I met for short strolls, my leg had no tolerance for the effects to my gait because of the curve that had developed due to that very leg's absence. It did not understand why I could not run and left me feeling blamed for my lack of wholeness. The more aware that I became of the myriad of ways that my leg's absence had affected me and changed me, the more I wanted my leg sorry for staying away. My leg was not sorry since it had been happily following it's own heart to it's own adventures. It certainly did not think that I should focus on what I was missing and it certainly did not accept any responsibility for the changes that had occurred in me. My leg thought that I spent all of my time aware of my curved spine, awkwardly slow gait and empty space since in it's presence, these things were brought to the forefront and into my clear view. My leg did not get to see me when I was distant from this view. It would take time to learn to walk together again; and even when we did, it would never be quite the same.