Melt My Heart to Stone

(Reflection #5: Create a literary work related to your anatomy dissection experience.)

Melt My Heart to Stone

That smell—- I will never forget that smell. It was more of a stench than a smell… They say that olfaction is one of the most powerful cues for memory:

This stench—- I will never forget this stench. With my scientific impressions of life’s great circle, from the zygotic dust of conception to the microcosmic ashes of carrion-feeding bacteria, I know better than to equate this stench with death. In a philosophical sense, it is quite the opposite—- it is actually the smell of reincarnation. It is clinical and scientific; it is the smell of knowledge being born from the womb of expired time. It is pungent like the scholarly sweat seeping into the meticulous detail of intelligent design. It is putrid—- overwhelmingly so. It is a stench strong enough to elicit humility in its students, like a divine warning not to fly too close to the sun of discovery. This is what a rite of passage smells like.

Death is, in fact, nowhere to be found in this situation. The spirit has fled from these bodies, although it has left plenty of its mortal secrets behind. While there is absence behind these glassy eyes that are frozen at half-mast, there is a certain familiarity about the expressionless features, in the mosaic of musculature around the mouth, the eternal remnants of a smile. I vaguely recall these features from beneath my own skin, yet my recollection is hazy as they are shrouded from my voyeuristic view.

This body is teaching me what it truly means to be human, what unites the two of us as brethren in the same race. It is providing me with understanding of the human as a machine, contextualizing my existence within the grand scheme of our species, of life—- smoothing the emotional and perhaps naïve edges of my worldly views and leaving me feeling infinitesimal.

 I find myself unconsciously holding his hand, unsure who is truly comforting whom. It seems most natural, most compassionate, most human. He is telling me his singular tale in the braille text of moles and freckles that decorate his skin in specific patterns as it is peeled back from his personal take on our common inventory of muscle and sinew. I am moved by his memoir and inspired to intrepidity, scalpel positioned for my opening gambit.

The more layers I remove, the more he reveals to me our similarities, that which is common between all of us. When skin is detached from bone, we are all different interpretations of the same vision—- we are all of the same flesh, our diverse personalities dictating the exact course of our veins. We are marionettes, our digits and joints still able to move at the mercy of a skillful puppeteer when our spirit has gone.

I extend his arm outward, moving it away from his trunk to reveal the closet of electrical wire hidden underneath. I gasp, overcome with appreciation for the logic behind this arrangement of nerves, strung ever so delicately to fulfill their purpose like the strings on a harp. Holding his heart in my hands, my awe in the face of such brilliant architecture for the sake of function overrides my sense of its significance as a battery on borrowed energy.

Perhaps I need this change in perspective to continue. The fact that the face is covered is no longer a condition of my gall.

I conceptualize the brain as a mystery, turning it over and back again between my palms and almost forgetting that every groove of fibrous grey represents the path for a thousand fragments of memory. I am holding a cedar box of old photographs, contemplating the specific pattern of marbling in the wood as if the rings on this tree do not tell a story that dates back to before my time.

I do not flinch at the chew of blade through the Achilles tendon as if I no longer dread the pain of such an injury, nor the mythological implications behind it. I am unfazed by the cling of paper-thin skin upon eyelid and the crack of jaw separated from skull.

Then, slicing unexpectedly deep to peel fingernail and bone from the thick cushion that underlies fingerprint, I wince, feeling his spirit within me as I sympathize through the vicarious experience of imaginary pain. I have finally severed the lifeline, his connection to the tangible world. I have finally separated this being from his true identity.

He is truly dead, yet the stench has been long forgotten.