Will They or Won't They?: Cecile Meets a Boxer (New Way to Bleed)
Title: Cecile Meets a Boxer
By: Tochi Onyebuchi
Song: New Way to Bleed
Artist: Evanescence
Album: Evanescence
(‘Cyborg Arm’ by Nads-designs on deviantArt (http://nads-designs.deviantart.com/art/Cyborg-Arm-173065735))
Cecile Meets a Boxer
Dear
Father,
Today, I fixed a man
Whose pain receptors
Were missing.
He wanted them back.
I asked him why
And ‘oblivion in pain’
Is what
He said.
The closer each impactful
Punch
Brings him to death
The better it feels.
Plus, parts are expensive
To replace.
‘Defects enhance me,’
He said.
But I can heal you,
I told him back.
Why? Is pain a
Warning? A
Caution against damage? A
Thing to run from?
Why not
Make it a thing to
Run towards?
A reminder
That we are alive?
Father,
I watched him fight
And the men changed in my eyes
From things to be healed
To things existing in their own right,
Experiencing
Their own genre of joy.
Father,
He taught me
That athletes are
Unknowable in the midst of their
Performance.
While he sleeps,
I plug into his brain
And I watch his fights.
The ones stored in his mainframe.
I do this to diagnose him
When he wakes
But also to sneak fugitive peeks
At his engine.
To see the android not as machine
But as animal.
To see the world from behind a busted retina
That makes the world look
As it would
From behind frosted glass.
‘I fight till I can’t
Anymore. Then they
Send me here.
Then I go back out
And I fight till I can’t
No more.
Then I come back.
To you.’
That is when I find the name for it.
For the tightening
In my chest
Whenever I sit down to compose my entries
To you.
That existential reaching,
That absence,
That void somewhere between my stomach
And my lungs.
The stiffness in my fingers,
The shortness of breath,
That flushing in my face as my capillaries
Expand.
It’s pain.
Delicious,
Expanding,
Exacting
Fulfilling
Like a poem
Whose form resembles the claret
That leaks from a newly opened wound.
Tochi Onyebuchi is a professional student whose academic interests are merely a clever disguise for his storytelling impulses. By day, he is a first-year law student. By night, he writes fictions. He can sometimes be found window-shopping PhD programs. His blog is a virtual chimera of his interests in cross-border smuggling, literature and New England. He tweets on occasion @TochiTrueStory.