by Isobel Bradshaw
I.
It’s often said that good things come in threes. I can vouch for that, I suppose, as it’s happened to me plenty of times: three surgeries before my legs worked like they should. Three men before I found one that wouldn’t hurt me. Three attempts on my own life before I started to pull myself together. The Holy Trinity of things that will knock me out without killing me. The regular Holy Trinity. Three Sacraments of Initiation before I thought to question. Decades are a bit different—the snake of 30 years coils around me and squeezes tight. And 30 isn’t old. Everyone tells me that, and I believe it myself. But it certainly feels old when you didn’t expect to see 20.
II.
I’ve spent most of my life operating on the kind of foreshortened future common in survivors. Dodged the question of what I want to do with my life by giving the simplest and truest answer: I want to write. Details aren’t important. I inched towards that goal one baby step at a time, operating on the knowledge that I might not get to take another. Minimized anything that could be seen as an accomplishment. Graduation. Marriage. I chafed under a spotlight, itching for a corner where no one would look at me. Charted my progress only by setbacks. Seven years separated the first attempt from the second. Ten months split the second and third; it’s been less than a year since. I consider myself in recovery from a myriad of things. I think I’ll be in recovery for the rest of my life.
III.
Time moves in a strange, syrupy way when you’re not looking. I didn’t think I’d hit 21, and it happened. I didn’t think—twice—that I’d hit 29, and it happened. The concept of a future that extends beyond a year or two is still foreign to me, but the uncertainty is tinged with something in a way it hasn’t been before. Not hope, not quite, but something close to it. A burgeoning belief that my hands are capable of producing work that matters. My body is already decaying, muscles deteriorating at a rate much faster than the average; most days it feels like my brain matches its pace. The urge to treat time as a finite resource is still there, and it grows stronger by the day, but it has the opposite effect on me now. A deadline to work with, and not against. Something to want, and not to fear.
Isobel Bradshaw is a queer and disabled author of fiction and hybrid work focusing on themes of religious trauma, queerness, and ownership of one’s body. She has a BFA in Creative Writing and lives in Ohio, USA with her partner and cats.