Do We Really Get Third Chances?
Maybe we’ve bought into the fiction that is the redemption tour
When I love something, I go deep. I burrow my head all the way in and lie there until I drown in the thing that consumes me.
After hundreds of hours of true crime episodes, after dozens of books towering high in a closet, I’ve learned that in the end, the proof of us, our life, is reduced to the physical. We are nothing if not dual strands of DNA, a smattering of crooked teeth. In the end, it doesn’t matter how many books we’ve published, love we’ve made, lives we’ve changed, if we’ve become closed casket candidates we’re identified by our blood and teeth.
No one else has a lease on our biology, no one else has the shape and structure of our teeth.
It’s only after crime scene technicians and investigators identify us do they embark on the work of reconstruction. Let’s add a layer of skin over this body, a set of eyes that once put a lover’s heart on pause. Let’s see that mouth open wide and now the teeth are part of a face that’s rearranged itself into a smile, a full-on beam of light, and there she goes, the girl we know. The woman we’ve loved. There she is unique and real and human again.
But what if you itch and writhe in the skin you’re in? You’ve been reassembled and made whole…
