MAIA DOLPHIN-KRUTE

Untitled (Tend #4)

I had a baby. I had a baby. No matter which way you say it, there is never enough time in that sentence. There’s no way to say that I had a baby and I don’t have one now, other than saying I lost a baby. Where did you lose it? Are you hanging lost baby flyers? When I moved to Jamaica Plain, there were black and white photocopied signs on every lamppost for a lost dog: perrito perdido. My tongue presses the roof of my mouth constantly now: perrito perdido, perrito perdido, perrito perdido. When our cat was lost, we hung signs the day before it rained, so that the next day the ink ran shockingly.

I was looking at the ceiling of the room. It will look exactly like the shiny linoleum hallways I used to run down as a kid, racing the passing reflections of overhead fluorescent lights, when I dream about it after. The dreams don’t last long. They return quickly to the dreams in which I am walking down our front steps or I am stepping into our hallway and our lost cat is rubbing my calves. Calves. A baby animal and a body part.

There was a photo of me, once, in a medical journal. Or not me, exactly, but my stomach. It was a photo of my stomach showing the ghost of fentanyl patches past, no longer ever able to be past because they were now imprinted (more or less verbatim) on my skin. Did you know that using a heating pad over pain patches makes the fentanyl release faster? I knew. Perrito perdido. The heat is what imprinted them. Having had a baby so quickly, I hardly had time to wonder how these imprints might stretch, what else they may have become. 

Maia Dolphin-Krute is a writer and artist based in Boston, working in the fields of disability studies and medical anthropology with a current focus on the opioid epidemic, from the position of a disabled/chronically ill person with chronic pain. Her books include Ghostbodies: Towards a new theory of invalidism (Intellect, 2017), Visceral: Essays on Illness Not as Metaphor (punctum books, 2017), and Opioids: Addiction, Narrative, Freedom (punctum books, 2018, forthcoming). Maia also recently served as the writer and producer of a public art and public health project focused on facilitating public conversations about the opioid epidemic, called The Way We Live Now (2018). More information about this and other projects can be found at ghostbodies.com.