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The Line Continued
She is the detective, armed with a dogged-eared copy of Dr. Spock's and a good dose of intuition, or maybe paranoia. She knows me inside out at this point and will for years to come. Wait, scratch that —in a few hours, she will only know my outsides. Every square millimeter of skin, every new hair or freckle, will still be hers to discover. But what lies inside becomes a mystery from here on out, a torrent of unpredictability, demons doing their work deep under the surface. Of course there will be symptoms. Of course my mother will be able to press her lips to my forehead and pronounce "cool as a cucumber", seemingly able to gauge the inner workings of my body. But these will just be symptoms, once-removed manifestations of malfunctions that she cannot understand. She will learn as much as she can, though, taking the next few weeks off from work spend in the library at Harvard Medical School. I will follow the same concrete curriculum come tenth grade, when the Biology teacher will explain that enzymes are like PacMan: grabbing, cutting, latching onto essential little cellular material with their "teeth"—should their teeth fail them, you lose the game. This understanding, call it what you will— medical, biological, rational—lies in its own realm, the how completely separate from the why, the when, the what if.
In these few remaining hours of knowledge, of certainty, she drives us downtown, parks, and puts me in the stroller. I am wearing pink. Three months before she opened a package and pulled out the cotton pants and matching tee shirt that I’m now dressed in. "How adorable!" she crooned. "Too bad they won't fit her in a month! This one"—she brushed a hand over my head as she spoke—"eats like there's no tomorrow." But as summer fades there we are, the leaves already changing, and I have yet to outgrow the outfit; so I wear it along with booties, chewing happily on one of the arms of a stuffed bear, needing to stretch my mouth to fit it around the toy’s limb.
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