The weather affects my pain level. This rainy, sticky, moist, grey yuckiness is what my body is feeling like now. I wonder if along with the earth, my body swells too, taking in the moistness, bloating with rains. The surgeon's scalpels have been scraping, slicing through my vaginal walls and deeper through my cervix all night. I feel like a rag, a damp, aching rag of a human body.
The days of warmth and sunshine were a haven and a heaven for my body. I almost felt great, I almost believed that the wound had healed and that I could march back into life with my healed and gracious body. And then the rain came and stayed and poured down and the earth kept swelling and swelling and my aching, tired body once again surrendered to the inevitable cruelty that it had escaped from for five whole days of delight.
Sleep did not come tonight. Chopped, chiseled, sliced, diced. If my body would bleed, there would be a deep puddle of dark red underneath me now. My body doesn't bleed, it keeps its suffering to itself, sharing its fate only with me.
What is left for me to do but to wait and to know that the sun will come back out, that my earth will heave and sigh underneath its warm and sensual arrival. That the plants whose flowers have been pounded away by the torrents will grow new ones. That my body will be joyful again and that it will sing again to me the way it did only a few days ago. It will once again tell me that there is so much hope for me and that there is so much beauty awaiting to unveil itself to me. I will once again believe it and I will once again feel the blessings bestowed upon me.
What else can I do, but relish, remember, give praise to those moments that now feel so foreign. And how quick the change is, like a cruel transformation from butterfly back to bug.
The knife is sharp, lodged deep inside. I imagine my legs, open, wide open with a beautiful tulip, open, wide open where my vagina is. These are the paintings that I want to paint. Bodies, open, wide open and blossoming. These are the images that help me make my way through the nights that feel  like a fight and a graveyard full of losses.
Nights of restorative sleep are for the angels. I am flesh, blood, nerves and knives.

Atara