I reclaimed my body by leaving pieces of it all over town.

The piercing parlor here, a doctor's office there. Pieces of "me" left in my wake. But instead of disappearing at the end of it, I sought to emerge whole, to discard the excess and strip myself down to the essentials.

It started long before I transformed it into a journey-on-purpose.

All four wisdom teeth, extracted the summer I was nineteen. The surgery offered assurances of feeling better, being better. I suffered through the painful, swollen healing process and recovered. The pain in my jaw, the headaches - all gone. Better.

Dozens of haircuts, tiny bits of my previous identity discarded to the floor. I wonder how many pieces of me are still out there in a landfill. Did any escape from a torn garbage bag and blow away to fertilize a patch of grass? Are they part of a bird's nest somewhere? Where did I go?

My dentist and his impossibly gorgeous assistants delve into my mouth to repair deep cavities. The drill buzzes and whines, removing layer after layer of enamel, creating larger and larger holes before they are backfilled with specialized cement. Organic teeth, diseased and decayed, replaced by artificial crowns that will never rot from plaque. Better.

I ask the dermatologist to remove a mole that constantly rubs against my bra strap. I find myself wondering where that little piece of me ended up. A waste bin decorated with biohazard stickers? A sterile landfill? An incinerator? But even incinerated, reduced to its primal elements of carbon and waste molecules, it's still out there.

Blood lost during a root canal while the endodontist and his young male assistant drawl about golf. I fall asleep out of boredom. When I jerk awake, my jaw is sore from being propped open, and they tell me that I snore. The doctor says that perhaps I should get that fixed. One "fix" reveals the need for another. This mission will never be over, I think.

Blood donations. Altruism in the form of literally donating a part of my body. The vital fluid will be renewed when my marrow produces fresh cells. The loss will not be permanent. But the sense of having done a good deed lingers.

I'm a better person now that part of me is missing, sucked out through a sterile needle and refrigerated until it is needed. I eat a cookie in the fluorescent-lit kitchen at the blood donation center. I go home and take a too-hot shower and almost faint. Stupid. I should have known better.

I feel like I am not a better person after all, I'm still my regular dumb self. Part of me is missing for a good cause and I almost died by fainting in the shower. I donate more blood as soon as I am eligible, paying careful attention to my shower's water temperature after each visit. If I do this correctly, again and again, I will become a better person.

A tattoo at twenty-seven after nearly a decade of indecision, unable to select a design that I will still love when I'm eighty. I finally choose my astrological symbol, reasoning that the only thing that will not change between here and the retirement home is my birthday. I am electric with anxiety, unsure of what to expect. The artist is a dude, about my age, and seemingly not all there. It hurts differently than I thought it would, but not too much, and it takes ages longer than I anticipated.

The itch lingers in my mind for weeks. I chase the buzzing and the pain of it four more times. Four more sessions with an artist. Four more healing periods of swelling and seeping, followed by scabbing and peeling. Pieces of me falling away, getting better. Closer to the new me.

At twenty-eight I have a child. The water breaking reminds me that I was carrying a whole world within my body, now drained and soaking into the absorbent pads on the gurney underneath my hips. The induction does not produce the desired outcome. My doctor leans over me with her warm, kind eyes and says that she needs to operate. An emergency C-section.

This time an entire human being is removed from me. I grew her myself, and now she can safely be detached to start her own life. Another piece of me - although not a selfish one, not one that was mine alone - is now gone. Pounds and inches fall away from my body while breastfeeding. I cut my hair short and chase the promise of a better me.

It does not work.

I am broken that entire spring and summer. I cry when I drop my keys. I cry when the toilet overflows. I cry when I think of how tiny my daughter is, and how everything that is wrong with her must be my fault. I want to disappear. I want to release everyone from the burden of caring for me. I do not wish to die, I simply wish to cease existing.

Postpartum depression. A medication from my doctor promises to fix the wonky brain chemicals, to make me better. It works. Pieces of my essential self start coming back to me.

More surgeries, age thirty. Severe sinus problems, and I think that my surgeon is soap-opera handsome and entirely too nice of a person to have the disgusting job of digging around in my skull. But the surgery works. Better.

Three months later I visit the ER with severe abdominal pain. My gallbladder needs to come out, but I get to keep a series of gnarly, full-color photos of it. One shows it laying on a blue surgical drape, in the next it is cut open to reveal the pearls that were hiding within. Another piece of me gone. Am I getting better?

I have an empty, inadequate, lifelong need inside. I try to fill it. Drinking. Drugs. Food. Nothing works.

I am forever hoping that I'll fit somewhere, but I'm not a puzzle piece looking for a spot to land, I'm a hungry hole rolling around and swallowing everything I can in order to fill myself. And holes don't fit anywhere.

I realize that the more I consume, the less of “me” there is to give to anyone. I quit the drugs. I quit drinking. I feel terrible. I fight the urge to shave my head, to make a mass statement of discarding "the old me."

Finally, slowly, deep down I start to feel better, and my husband and I decide we’re ready to have a second child. More blood spilled, another C-section cut into me by my excellent surgeon.

Despite the fact that I have “accomplished” things like having my name on a mortgage and birthing two children, I feel as if nothing about me is good enough. I have a career that others tell me I am good at… and sometimes I actually believe them. But even that does not last.

I change jobs and it is a mistake. I make more mistakes. I make one huge mistake and get fired. Twelve years of a "good" career, gone in an afternoon.

I cry about it, but deep down I am relieved.

I throw myself into being a housewife. I stay sober. I learn to cook. I turn forty. My son is about to enter kindergarten, my daughter will go to middle school. This is a good time for a new me, I think.

I go back to school to pursue a long-buried dream, a course of study that has haunted me since I gave it up twenty years before.

I hate that I am finally finding myself long after I “should have” done so. Despite the fact that I am pursuing my dream, I think that it is embarrassing to be back in school at my age, not exemplary. I am uncomfortable when people express admiration for my choices. But I stuff the discomfort down and chatter excitedly about my studies and my plans to go to grad school.

Being an undergraduate student makes me feel competent and smart, as if the promise of who I am “supposed to be” is finally within reach. I throw myself into my studies that first fall semester. I lean hard into the new me. I take extra classes and push myself harder the next spring.

Pandemic hits. COVID. Unprecedented times. Schools shut down, and suddenly my husband and two children are home with me all day, every day. But I can do this, right? I can keep going, study harder, do better.

I continue my studies full-time over the spring that first year of quarantine, losing patience with my children when they interrupt me.

I sign up for three online classes that summer, and study in between continuous interruptions. I make a low grade in one class. I berate myself for it.

August. Everything is still virtual. I sign up for a full course load and oversee my children during their Zoom schooling, even when it interrupts my own Zoom meetings. I stay up until midnight or past it, completing my own work.

Despite my best efforts, we all struggle.

I drop two of my four classes, expecting a sense of relief. Instead I feel worse.

The incessant conflict between my family’s needs and my desires makes me feel as if I am wedged between two boulders, being ground into a fine paste. Soon there will not be anything left of me to scoop up.

I drop another class, down to only one.

I do not like giving up parts of my dream, but my dream is the only part of our family machine that can be cut to keep us whole. My husband must work, my children must attend school, but my dream is optional. It’s better for everyone if I sacrifice.

I try to keep my dream alive. I interview for an exhilarating internship for the coming spring semester. They offer it to me. My husband buys me flowers in congratulations.

A week later I realize how little of me there is to go around. I write a polite email and regretfully decline the internship. I finish my lone fall semester class with a B. I feel like a failure.

I realize that I cannot spread myself any thinner than I already have. Something will have to give, and it turns out to be the remainder of my dream.

I do what is necessary to hold my family together.

I do not re-enroll for what would be the final, graduating semester of my shiny new Bachelors degree. I do not get the opportunity to apply for grad school. I will not become the person who I desperately want to be. The dream I have been chasing for the past twenty months and the twenty years before that is gone.

The new year arrives. There is nothing of “me” left, just blunt shards wet with tears.

I tell people that I am taking a “pandemic pause” so that I do not have to say “I dropped out.” I begrudgingly accept their sympathy and reassurances that someday I will go back and finish. But deep down I know that I am no longer good or smart enough to pursue that dream.

I look at my shelf full of textbooks and I feel ashamed. How stupid of me to think that I ever had a chance. My shame is mixed with the metallic tinge of fear that I will never get another chance like this. The path to my dream career has closed, overgrown with obstacles, and I am now so thoroughly broken that I cannot take any more steps.

I fight the urge to sink into depression, the familiar pull of giving up. But I have no choice except to keep going, to take care of my family and to keep them alive, even if I feel dead inside.

I go through the motions of my routines and my duties.

I read in order to keep my brain occupied. If I am not using that organ for school it may as well be put to good use on fiction and non-fiction, current affairs and ancient history.

I begin to feel skittishly curious about things, and ideas ferment in my brain.

I start to write, another long-dormant habit from more than twenty years before. I write every day, in and around the interruptions of children and housework. A chance meeting online introduces me to a new friend, who introduces me to a writing community. I stay up late into the night writing. I produce pieces that I am proud of, and that other people seem to enjoy reading.

I read more. I write more.

I enroll in a summer creative writing class at the community college. I produce more work, more pieces of me that take shape and go out into the world.

I leave more pieces of myself around town.

Another autumn. I schedule a surgery to remove a part of me that has been causing problems for thirty years. I decide to have my nose pierced, a desire from twenty years before that I denied because of my first career. The surgical center and the piercing shop both accept me for who I am and take away the pieces of me that are hurting.

I am starting to feel whole, more like myself. I have reclaimed some pieces of myself, although there is much more to do.

I spill my brain out onto paper, I refill my fountain pens directly from my jugular.

I start to dream again.

I’m reading a book about a woman who travels. She’s the opposite of me. She has lived in seemingly a thousand different places and seen parts of the globe that I’ve never even imagined visiting.

She frames it as a wild journey, running from place to place to place to place for decades. A desperate fleeing of her circumstances, the endless search for self.

I am jealous. I burn with envy that she is witty and articulate and has a passport and friends whom she can visit, dipping in and out of their lives on a whim.

But she only sees what she doesn’t have: a partner or a husband, her name on a mortgage. She frames herself as immature, an object of pity. How odd she is to be couch surfing at her age, when everyone else has settled down, moved into the trappings of adulthood, has stopped the childish wandering.

And I am stuck. Sitting at my dining room table to devour her book while slumped on a half-broken hand-me-down chair. A chair that was purchased to fulfill someone else’s taste. A chair I cannot afford to replace, and so I have to ignore how ugly it is, how useless.

I’m stuck in the city of my childhood.

I have never had the opportunity to leave, except for a brief stint teaching English overseas.

It was always intended to be temporary, a fling of adventure between graduating from university and getting married. A five-month ordeal of undiagnosed depression and anxiety and drinking too much alcohol. A torturous winter of sleeping for fourteen hours a day and not speaking to anyone for days, feeling out of place because I am at least three years older than everyone else in the program, and in your early twenties that makes a big difference. A blur of homesickness and temporary insanity and getting punched in the face one night when a man tries to mug my friend. I recognize that his pistol is fake, so I try to push him into traffic and he hits me, landing a solid hook to my right cheek and leaving a dent that you can still see today when I scrunch my cheeks up to smile.

But I have never had the option to live anywhere but here. Locked into staying in my hometown at eighteen, forbidden from applying to colleges outside of my city due to financial constraints and the iron will of my widowed mother who raised four teenagers by herself.

And now that I’m forty-three and middle aged I wonder if maybe I should have just run away from home after high school? Run off to New York City where things actually happen to people? Where life gets lived?

But I couldn’t. I didn’t.

By the time I was eighteen I had a boyfriend I loved, and I knew even then that he was a kind man and would be a good husband and father. And so I stayed, locked into my small little life, dreaming of moving away to anywhere else, jealous of everyone I knew who got to “go away to college” and live their own lives. I thought I would get a chance later.

And now it’s too late. I have children and pets, my name on a mortgage, elderly mothers (my own and my husband’s) who rely on us for companionship and help and stability. I can’t just pull up stakes and abandon everyone. But neither can I capriciously take a job across state lines and move my entire family on a whim. I am stuck.

And so I read this lady’s book, fear and jealousy and heartbreak churning in my gut. Glad for her when she finally settles down, finds a house of her own in a city that she loves, feels her roots growing and the calm of middle age settling in… she gets her happy ending.

What if I am well and truly stuck here? What if the furthest I ever travel for the rest of my life is Dallas? What happens to me if I die in this city, never having truly lived a life of my choosing? What, if anything, changes for me?

I don’t want to contemplate that question, because it hurts to think about, but the answer surprises me… nothing. Nothing will change.

I will still love my children and cook dinner and read library books and knit. But most of all I will still write. I’ll still burn inside each day until I get the words out.

Maybe traveling the world isn’t a prerequisite for being a good writer.

Maybe I’m not missing anything at all.

Maybe I should bloom where I’ve been planted, instead of feeling rootbound and resentful.

Maybe I’m just fine. Maybe…

His face is a storm cloud. No warning, no chance to prepare myself. Just anger.

I grasp for answers, gathering my scattered thoughts as I consider whether or not to bolt, to run, to finally hear my footsteps rain down upon the stairs as I escape.

I stand still.

His screams thunder through my skull. Threats of violence, threats to leave. No threat can be worse than the one I aim at myself: to survive this or die trying.

My field of vision is limited to his face an inch from mine, full of angry gnashing teeth and a flood of spittle as he yells.

I swallow, willing myself to hold back the tears. They drop without permission, run down my cheeks and splash on the battered hardwood floor.

I shake, clamping my hands over my ears as if that will protect me. All it does is funnel his screams into concentrated echoes, penetrating deeper into my soul.

And then he's done. Spent. He stomps away to slam out of the house with a final curse tossed at me, the parting blow.

I breathe, remove my hands from my ears and stretch my aching arms.

I walk to the bathroom and undress. Hot water needles my skin, the spray too sharp against my bruises. But pain means I am alive. The shower is a habit, an ingrained reflex, a ritual after every fight.

As if I can wash this off.