You were fourteen when the hand sunk between your shoulder blades. It happened in Mexico. A week-long family vacation. The hand belonged to an older woman, with pale skin shaded by a sunhat and an abundance of wrinkles surrounding the mouth. She had been listening in on your tour guide’s explanations of Diego Rivera murals from a few feet away. Your parents were there. What they were doing, the building you were in, all fades from memory. Only the hand remains. It dug into your skin for a moment, and was gone, having used you as a brief anchor. A handhold; nothing more. This was before you got sick. It was the first time you felt entirely disposable.

Neither you nor the woman once spoke to each other. You didn’t speak for most of that trip, too busy writing a novel in your head. One of many unfinished projects. It would assemble itself during long waits to get into museums, and then be forgotten in the morning. Now you have retained only a few, spider-web thin plot details. The main character, a girl named ‘M.’ A boy who loves her.

You never wrote it down because you didn’t pack your computer. There won’t be time, you’d thought. I’ll be too busy learning Spanish. (Years before you were born, your uncle had visited Mexico and wore a sweatshirt reading “USA” at all times, in an attempt to dissuade anyone from speaking Spanish to him. He’s now fluent in four languages, including Spanish. His wife is Turkish. They are raising their children to be bilingual. It is still your family’s favorite story to tell.) The notebook you did bring was supposed to record only stories of your travels. It ended up recording none, then sat on your bookshelf for years after, abandoned. The price of enforced passion. 

You didn’t know then, how easily your mind would replace long walks in the Mexico sun with aimless over-the-phone arguments. The ‘now’ felt too powerful. Your dad bought the trip notebook for you. It had a glossy dark blue cover, and pages thick enough to sink paint in. “I like buying gifts for you,” he’d said. His lips traveling back sideways, not quite smiling. So you never opened it. A heartless act - an inevitable act. You were young and used to scurrying away from your parents’ grasps and camera lenses. Acts of kindness would not change this - only an older heart would call for its father. 

What you do know is that after looking at Diego Rivera’s murals, the guide took your family to both of Frida Kahlo’s former houses. One, a painted-blue cottage. The other, two block-buildings connected by a frail balcony. The former was crawling with fellow tourists. The latter was less so. As Diego and Frida’s relationship deteriorated, the guide said, they’d each choose one block to live in and have the balcony as a “middle ground.” Your dad, by virtue of studying art in college, has heard the Diego-Frida love story many times. Now he has run out of opinions to have on it. 

“It used to be super popular to go, ‘well of course Frida was better than Diego’,” he said. Then trailed off, not interested in following the thought to conclusion. 

Back at the hotel, your dad translated a snatch of an Italian tour guide’s opening remarks: “Let me tell you a love like a fire…” You all laughed about it, then mimicked it, every time exaggerating the accent more and more until it became gibberish. A Frida Kahlo biopic played, muted, in the background. Frida Kahlo posters, dolls, and coloring books sat in your suitcase. They haunt your room now too. 

Through it all, the hand, along with the word that flashed in your head when it grabbed your shoulders, stayed with you. Invalid, the hand said. Invalid, invalid, invalid. It did not feel then, like a harbinger. Doom permeated every syllable nonetheless. Were you some disciple, marked in blood? Or perhaps you were a scared teenager, looking for reasons to give up. 

You couldn’t remember where you’d heard the word before. Yet the shame attached to it, the sheer rot, was almost too much to bear. Invalid was a joyless souvenir. Your bag sagged with the burden of keychains and portable fans. After long days you threw it on your unmade bed, only to discover a similar weight resting against your chest. Pressing. Like it was looking for something. 

There had been a time in your life when you were obsessed with injuries. Broken legs. Your American Girl doll got mini crutches, and a mini signed cast. Both a doll-appropriate purple. On the living room floor you took her cast off, put it on again, took it off. Intoxicating. You had your dad hammer a nail in your bedroom ceiling, directly above your own bed, then attach a string to that nail, and tie that string around your foot, allowing you to lie down and appear as if you’d hurt your leg and needed elevation. This was how you lived. Neighbors came over and you showed off the contraption, beaming. 

When one’s life is uneventful, mimicking trauma becomes a hobby. It’s fun, it’s otherworldly. To lay battered, bruised, to be a damsel in distress. White flag waving. Prince soon arriving. The pain is something you have been taught to find romantic since you were a little girl, reading old magazines. In Life, there is a photo of a dead woman named Everlyn. Her body is splayed atop a car, appearing almost posed, asleep. She jumped off the Empire State Building. This is the most famous photo of them all. It makes sense. Until the hand comes. You came home from the trip, and examined yourself in the mirror with a desperate prayer. To be young, to be healthy, forever. 

For the next year, you only wrote stories of immortality. None were that good. Plenty were ripped wholecloth from movie trailers. The woman on the screen falls into a swamp and stops aging. So did your characters. You tried to write from the angle of immortality being torturous, but that could not disguise your hunger for it, your unearned desire. You stopped squinting. You didn’t want wrinkles. 

Frida Kahlo died young, the guide told you. She’d gotten polio at six, which had given her a limp, and was a passenger on a crushed bus at eighteen. The latter incident would leave her with a handrail impaling her pelvis, a spine broken in three places, a right leg broken in eleven places, a dislocated shoulder, and a broken collarbone. The pain and its complications would eventually kill her, but in the meantime become a subtext to every piece of art she ever made. Bedridden at home, Frida took up painting. She was her first subject, using a mirror above her bed to do self-portraits. Frida’s first and last paintings were of herself. 

Her injuries required not just extensive bedrest but a full-body cast. In a letter to her then-lover Alejandro, who had been on the bus with her, Frida wrote, “A short while ago…I was a girl walking in a world of colors, of clear and tangible shapes…Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice.” In another letter, Frida said she’d “been suffering sheer martyrdom; I’m suffocating, my lungs and my whole back are in agony.”

For every Frida Kahlo painting, there is a list of internal and external woes she was undergoing while creating it. Miscarriages, infidelity, wheelchairs, divorce. The laminated sheets at echoey museum exhibits say as much. While standing in front of La Dos Fridas, your dad ruminated on this. “She was so talented,” he said. “I wish she’d gotten to make art without all this crap in the way.” 

“She might not have been so famous, if it weren’t for all of that,” you said. The painting depicts two mirror-portraits of Frida, connected by one bloody elongated vein. One Frida’s heart is sliced open, the other whole. Both Fridas are holding hands, staring at the viewer. It is stunning. Bigger in person. “People love the tortured artist cliche. Like Van Gogh cutting off his ear,” you continued.

“Well I hope those people die,” your dad replied. Flatly. And the conversation was done, followed to its conclusion. 

On your fourth night in Mexico, the pain came. It started as a burst in your stomach, then took over your entire frame, forcing you to lie down on the stiff hotel couch, mouth emitting nothing but quick, breathless screams. The pain had come before. Not often enough. You had just a series of short fits, you were not ill, you were not useless. Most importantly you had not grown tired of it. Every new painful yell was a fresh, bloody sensation. 

Your mom sat down on the floor, close to you. She did not touch you. She knew better than that. In soft murmurs she told you dad had left to find some kind of heating device. When he’d be back, she didn’t know. On the coffee table, a speaker was playing music. A sad ballad. One of the more overwrought ones. You figured you’d earned it. 

“What kind of pain is it?” She asked. “Is it sharp?”

You just groaned. 

“Sarah,” your mom said, like an archeologist uncovering some rare find. A revelation. Your hand was on your belly. Tears coated your face, your neck. “This might be what, for you, this might be like giving birth.” 

It was a scene you knew well. A young girl, weakened. Her head to the heavens as she loses her last bits of life. Just a year ago you’d been obsessed with musical theater, with opera, gothic poetry. The lady always dies. In Les Miserables, Fantine gives her life slowly, first her two front teeth, then her hair, then her whole self. All for her daughter. She is holy because of this. An almighty mother. You played Shakespeare’s Juliet, who dies twice because of her love. This makes her holy, too, though not as holy as Romeo, the almighty lover. And yet. These women die for a cause. Their once-young bodies are sacrifices. For their children. For their parents. Some crucial narrative purpose, at least. The death is sacred, the reader reborn. 

In his 1916 essay, Fantine in our Day, Eugene V. Debs wrote “Fantine, the…trusting girl, the innocent, betrayed, self-immolating young mother, the despoiled, bedraggled hunted and holy martyr to motherhood, to the infinite love of her child, touches to tears and haunts the memory like a melancholy dream.” Everlyn Mchale, the suicidal woman whose photo you saw in Life all those years ago, wrote in her note that “I don't want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me.” She was cremated. Buried without a grave. Declared “The Most Beautiful Suicide” and looked upon for years later, serving as inspiration for a thousand and one art installations. 

You didn’t want this. You wanted it terribly, did not know any way to be pretty, important, other than to die. Use me, you begged the world. It does not need you, the hand whispered back. You cannot offer it anything. Invalid. 

As you waited for your dad to return, a treacherous all-powerful thought took hold. That right now you were losing your body for nothing, nothing at all.