​Some time ago, I started having a sharp pain on my knee. I asked Eric, and he said it was a twinge. Eric is my to-go-to in all matters concerning physical therapy because of his long experience as an athlete. I always rely on his judgment. He recommended heat when at rest and an ace bandage when exercising it. When my nurse aid found out, she said to refrain from walking with the crutch and switching to the bar instead. And I stopped going to the bathroom to reduce the demand on my right leg. After a while of taking care of it, my knee ceased to hurt. But then my ankle started feeling sore.
This time, Eric couldn’t identify the cause, so he couldn’t come up with a treatment. And yet, even if the pain felt like a dull ache, when the time came to walking in the dining room with the crutch, I had to stop after a short while and switch to arm exercises. Eric agreed to my suggestion of heat and cold, adding to it the use of an ice pack after exercise. He didn’t think much about my idea of putting an insole in my shoes, but went and bought two. And when he was going to put them in, he discovered that the shoes already had one! So now I had four remedies for my ankle: heat before exercising, cold afterward, giving my ankle a break, and insoles in my shoes. So far, it doesn’t really look like they’ve taken effect – the pain comes and goes. But I’m somewhat optimistic; I’m hoping it will subside, and I’ll be able to go back to walking.
This shifting pain is a new problem for me. I’d been walking for more than a year without any kind of issue in my feet or legs, and I was feeling lucky because no pain had appeared to thwart my practicing. And here I was, unable to walk regularly right in the middle of my exercises. Eric dismissed my ankle pain saying that he couldn’t find a cause for it and it wasn’t sharp. Then, he gave his own nerve pain as an example: I should tough it out until it subsided. His response made me really mad. How could he compare my pain with his? How could he compare me, a brain injury survivor who couldn’t even walk, with him, a “normal” person? The gall!
Yet I should pay more attention to what Eric says. Actually, I should pay more attention to what others, the “normal” people, have to say. “Normal” people have a lot of experiences to share with me from which I can learn. No past experience, as rough as it was and as many disabilities as it caused, enables me to teach others, the “normal” people. No experience puts me in a position of exceptionality. As my nurse aid said when I asked her what I should do, if I should stop or continue walking, “babying” the foot because it was sore (in my case, because I’m scared of the foot’s getting worse and preventing me from walking, which would stop me from practicing) is the worse way of protecting it. It’s better to walk, even if I’m in pain (or, in Eric’ words, to “tough it out”), because that way, my ankle will heal.
Since I had the injury I’m scared of everything, and among these things, I’m scared of my pain’s getting worse and my being unable to walk, trapped in my bed. True. But I have to stop “babying” myself. And I have to stop finding reasons – which are actually excuses – to keep doing it. I have to step out of the position where my experience has put me, and thus giving up the advantage it gives me – the comfort it implies. I have to walk, no matter how, in order to be free as fast as possible.

​I’m lying in bed, tired after a long, wearying day of monotonous exercises and of researching, writing, and translating (although these last ones are my most joyful activities). Amid drifting thoughts, I suddenly feel I’m suspended in the air. It’s the same feeling I used to have when I on a plane – as if the plane were still in mid-air, when it was actually flying at high speed. And this feeling is part of a seamless weave of memories that transports me into a past that when I didn’t have a crutch: when I could walk fast without hesitation; when I could speak and type fast without hesitation; and when I could fly to Argentina, where my home, family, and old friends live.
After I met Eric and all the time we were together, he and I would fly to Argentina every year, and I would show him my favorite spots in Buenos Aires, the city where I was born and raised. And after Nathan grew up, the three of us would travel around and visit stunning places– or revisit some, in my case. There, we had the chance of walking around and enjoy the views they could offer. We went to Peninsula Valdés, a gorgeous place south of Buenos Aires, where the water is blue and clear; piles of fossils form rocky elevations; and sea lions, elephant seals, whales, and penguins come to breed. We went to the northwest, where there’s a desert with deep ravines surrounded by breathtaking rock mountains that rise up into cloudless skies.
And the sense of flying also brings along a pervading fear that comes to me from the future – I experience the anticipated feeling that will accompany me on the ride to the airport; will sit beside me, in front of me, and behind me in the lounge; and will follow me on the way to the plane that will fly to Argentina, where my home is; where my family and old friends live; and where my mother, who is very old and in need of company, lives.
Fear will sit beside me, in front of me, and behind me in the plane as I have the familiar sense of being suspended in the air. If I overcome my inability to walk without a cane and am vaccinated (which will make me immune to the omnipresent virus), maybe I won’t be able to go home anyway because I won’t overcome this all-pervasive fear that has stubbornly decided to remain with me forever.

​I was talking about Kahlo with a friend who is an artist and art critic. We discussed Kahlo’s accident and the way it had influenced her art. My friend mentioned details about the artist’s life that were unknown to me. I found out that Kahlo had had her accident when she was in her teens, and that because of her accident, she’d been forced to spend a large part of her life in bed and undergo plenty of operations. So, her accident and its aftermath had left an indelible mark in her art that can be seen in most of her work. My friend spoke about her visit to the Kahlo museum in Mexico and the impression it had made on her; Kahlo’s death and her body were constantly present in her artworks, so much so, that seeing it had completely changed my friend’s view of the world. After our conversation, I started googling the artist and her paintings, and was struck by her work. I was familiar with it because of youth memories, but reading about her was getting to know her again.
During our conversation, my friend and I discussed Kahlo’s appearance in her own paintings. When I said that when I saw them in my youth I’d been (negatively) impressed by their self-centeredness, my friend argued that the impact of Kahlo’s works transcended her presence in them. Seeing her paintings again today, when my memory of them was already vague, made me rethink their content and effect on viewers. Because of my feeling an identification with her – to a certain extent – I started to reexamine the influence of my injury and convalescence on the content of my poems.  
A fresh view of Kahlo’s paintings made me reflect on my injury and its impact on my work. The first poetry book I wrote, Lagos [Lakes], was based on my waking up from my coma and the feelings my injury had caused in me – confusion, memory loss, and disability had generated anger (because of my inability to move and my constant dependence on the aid of others) and a sense of helplessness. I wanted to translate my emotions into words, but I chose to erase the I from my poems and replace it with infinitives; I (mistakenly) disliked women poets’ constant resort to personal feelings and (male) critics’ pointing at intimacy as a major feature of “feminine” poetry. Yet, after reading about Frida Kahlo and looking at her work, a lot of new questions appeared in my mind; I’m having to reevaluate the relationship between traumatic experiences and physical pain, and the word or stroke, and the transcendence of self-presence.

​A few days ago, I called my cousin to say good-bye to her before she left for the US. My cousin’s daughter and son-in-law have been living in California since before they had a baby, Carmen, and Carmen is now six years old. My cousin loves her granddaughter and misses her awfully. Argentina authorized trips abroad, and California is taking careful steps to avoid contagion. So, with preventive measures in place, my cousin decided to travel to the US to visit with Carmen.
We had a long talk about our lives, our family, political issues, and the two things that are always in everybody’s mind around the world: the COVID pandemic, and the quarantine measures taken by each country. When we were about to hang up, my cousin said she wanted to congratulate me on the progress I’d made on my walking; she’d seen the latest video of me Eric had sent, which my mom had forwarded her. My cousin was very impressed about the product of my efforts.
            I told her there was no need to congratulate me; it wasn’t my perseverance and effort that had caused it but self-imposed high standards. My cousin, who’s a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, said that there was another possibility besides self-imposed high standards (which, in my case, are usually accompanied by self-criticism): my wish to live. It was my wish to live that had encouraged me to persist with my exercises.
            Her statement brought back memories. I suddenly recalled what had prompted me to do my exercises time and time again – what had made me persevere with them all. I wanted to be able to talk, sing, drink water, and cook, but most of anything, I wanted to be able to walk with a cane (I talk about it in previous chapters). And I realized that my cousin was right: my wish to walk and drink and sing and cook had stemmed from my wish to live.

​On one of the days devoted to walking, as I was resting after several laps around the wooden handrail made by Eric, my nurse aid and I started discussing the different features of my exercise. We wondered about the cause of my loss of balance at various stages of the lap, and decided it was the narrowness of the structure that had prevented me from keeping a good distance between my legs. We came to the conclusion that when I practiced in the handrail, I should walk up and down with the crutch and then turn while holding on to the bar. My nurse aid must have perceived my self-criticizing attitude during our conversation because she advised that instead of seeing my loss of balance as a mistake, I should look at it as a learning experience.
In the two years I’ve been practicing to walk, I’ve been seeing anything that didn’t fulfill my expectations as a failure. And my expectations have been always above the ordinary. When I first came home, I couldn’t walk without the brace, and Eric always had to help me. That meant I had to practice on Sundays so that Eric wouldn’t have to work. Gradually, I took out the brace and switched to the bar at my insistence (I wanted to walk without help, and that meant being able to lock my knee). I have a vague memory of my early exercises (it was more than a year ago, and my brain hadn’t healed yet), but I remember I was outside on my wheelchair and was crying, and my then nurse aid was telling me not to be so hard on myself.
Many nurse aids came and went in more than a year I’ve spent practicing and practicing, and all of them told me as they were leaving that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. And I’ve switched to the crutch three days a week, part inside the handrail, part outside, and I still see my falls (or almost-falls) as failures. I have to shake my head to take away my thoughts, straighten my back, look ahead, and think, “I can do it.” And when I’m back on my chair, I try to push my memories of a small incident out of my mind. I pretend it never existed and smile. And the walking days are still bad days on my calendar. That’s why I keep trying not to be hard on myself, and to see my falls as learning experiences.