To be honest, every time I entered the rehabilitation room, I felt depressed and gloomy.
I was convinced that I had never been as helpless as when my two legs no longer felt like my own. It was that panicky fear of losing control of the path one stood on.
After the car crash, I had persistently hobbled around with the help of the rehabilitation devices, I stretched my muscles, and I ate lots of protein according to the doctor’s advice. Yet, despite my body appearing recovered and healthy, my leg muscles had atrophied into soft, useless tissue that could no longer support me, no longer push me forward.
The doctor had prescribed me twenty minutes of physical therapy each day, so every morning an assistant helped me complete the simple exercises. But I wasn’t satisfied. These basic, gradual movements led to few results. Everyone thought it was already a miracle that I had survived, so no one had any expectation or optimism that I’d one day stand and walk again. Therefore, their heart wasn’t in it.
Since last week, I had taken advantage of Yin Li’s absence from the house and secretly began to increase my rehabilitation load. It reached the point where I was adding an extra twenty minutes of rehab in the afternoon. However, that was my limit. I still needed to support myself with equipment to stand up.
But today that would change. I would end my dependence on the equipment. I wanted to walk unaided, even if all I could manage was a single tiny step. I knew in my heart that I had no one to rely on but myself so I had to be able to freely walk forward on my own strength.
When I first relaxed my hold on the handrails, my body wildly wobbled back and forth before I found my center of gravity. Then finally, I could take both hands off the bar and remain standing. It felt exhilarating. With a sudden courageous impulse, or you could say, hubris, I then attempted to take a step forwards.
An excruciating pain tore through my body.
My mind was ready to walk but my body wasn’t. As if moving forwards on a knife’s edge, I sweated profusely with each little motion. In the mirror, my pained face warped into that of a ferocious, crazed demon. I glared at my reflection, in which I was gasping for breath like a burdened old cow. I clenched my teeth, put my right foot forwards, and felt pain flare up in my knee and ligaments. My legs were like the broken-down gears of a machine and any minuscule motion created friction between the cogs. It was so painful that I could faint. The five-meter distance between myself and the support felt immeasurably vast.
Sucking in a breath of air, I proceeded to inch my left foot forwards. In my mouth, I could taste the faintly metallic tinge of blood from where I had already bitten through my lip.
As I put my left foot down, I already felt a sense of foreboding. When my heel touched the ground, my leg felt limp and painful, a sensation which was immediately followed by a heart-rending and lung-splitting1 agony. Drowning in the pain, I fought to keep hold of my center of gravity, but I was defeated.
My ears registered the sound of my body crashing heavily to the ground. Really very painful.
Despite being exceedingly careful, I still managed to slip and fall.
In this deserted rehabilitation room, I was actually quite frightened, or you could say uneasy. Every step was so unpredictable, and in any moment I could tumble to the ground again. I was someone who was scared, really scared of pain. And furthermore, all of my fear and suffering was for the sake of this frustratingly slow, extremely difficult progress, was for such an unseemly and inelegant struggle to take just a single, petty, little step.
Only when I fell did the tears brimming in my eyes flow down my face. Lying on my back, eyes raised to the ceiling, I cried silently.
Struggling back up was more even more painful than falling down. The fall and the subsequent pain are instantaneous, but getting up was an endless torment, a bitter misery. By the time I finally managed it I was drenched in sweat, the saltiness of my perspiration flowing from eyebrows to eyelashes. From time to time droplets of sweat landed in my eyes, burning stronger than my own tears.
I messily wiped my face, thinking that just one battle to stand seemed to already exhaust my vitality. But at this moment I was gambling with rest of my life. Each fall only increased my fear of the next, because truthfully in my heart I was a cowardly weakling. If I ever retreated, I knew with certainty that I would never regain the courage to stand back up again.
I inched my left foot forwards again, making an infinitesimally small step, all the while feeling the tremors running through my leg.
When my left foot finally stabilized on the ground, I remembered how to breathe and my heart trembled with emotion. I needed to keep going like this, walking forwards one step at a time, until the day I rediscovered what it was like to to run.
In those five meters, I fell eight times. In that quiet room, one figure tumbled to the ground again and again, and another figure silently crawled back up amidst sweat and tears. There was no audience to applaud at my perseverance, no bouquets of flowers, no spotlight—there was only my loneliness.
When I fell for the last time at the end of those five meters I felt liberated. Even my nerves seemed dulled to the pain. I knew I might have reopened the wound on my lower leg from the way I could feel a warm wetness there and from the faint taste of iron in the air when I inhaled, but I didn’t care at all because I felt like I had finally regained control of my life.
I huddled on the floorboards, curled my arms around my head and silently began to cry. The emotions I had been holding in broke free in that moment and gushed out—the desperation and helplessness I’d felt previously when I worried that I’d never walk again, the fear and dread of facing an unfamiliar world after losing my memories, the disappointment and bitterness when I discovered that no one in the world needed my presence, the false bravado and carefree attitude I masked my panic and weakness in, the discomfort of not knowing how to approach my present and future—all of these feelings poured out of me along with my tears.
I lay on the ground like that, simply crying with whatever strength I had left in me, loudly wailing at the top of my voice. Like I was fighting a battle with myself, I wrestled with all the grievances and fears I had no one to share with and finally defeated the coward in me.
1 In Chinese the phrase “撕心裂肺” translates literally to “heart-tearing, lung-splitting” and is used to indicate extreme pain; grief; etc. I guess an English equivalent might be something like “heart-breaking” or “heart-wrenching” but those are usually more commonly associated with emotional pain, imo.
TL: ALSO we have a bit of a dilemma. I personally enjoy learning Chinese idioms which is why I leave them in somewhat of a literal translation. Niang Niang disagrees with me though and thinks literal translations ruin the flow…what do you guys think??
Niang Niang: Also what do you guys think of having the translation note at the end of the paragraph instead of at the very bottom of the chapter? I imagine the back-and-forth scrolling can get pretty cumbersome.
To be honest, every time I entered the rehabilitation room, I felt depressed and gloomy.
I was convinced that I had never been as helpless as when my two legs no longer felt like my own. It was that panicky fear of losing control of the path one stood on.
After the car crash, I had persistently hobbled around with the help of the rehabilitation devices, I stretched my muscles, and I ate lots of protein according to the doctor’s advice. Yet, despite my body appearing recovered and healthy, my leg muscles had atrophied into soft, useless tissue that could no longer support me, no longer push me forward.
The doctor had prescribed me twenty minutes of physical therapy each day, so every morning an assistant helped me complete the simple exercises. But I wasn’t satisfied. These basic, gradual movements led to few results. Everyone thought it was already a miracle that I had survived, so no one had any expectation or optimism that I’d one day stand and walk again. Therefore, their heart wasn’t in it.
Since last week, I had taken advantage of Yin Li’s absence from the house and secretly began to increase my rehabilitation load. It reached the point where I was adding an extra twenty minutes of rehab in the afternoon. However, that was my limit. I still needed to support myself with equipment to stand up.
But today that would change. I would end my dependence on the equipment. I wanted to walk unaided, even if all I could manage was a single tiny step. I knew in my heart that I had no one to rely on but myself so I had to be able to freely walk forward on my own strength.
When I first relaxed my hold on the handrails, my body wildly wobbled back and forth before I found my center of gravity. Then finally, I could take both hands off the bar and remain standing. It felt exhilarating. With a sudden courageous impulse, or you could say, hubris, I then attempted to take a step forwards.
An excruciating pain tore through my body.
My mind was ready to walk but my body wasn’t. As if moving forwards on a knife’s edge, I sweated profusely with each little motion. In the mirror, my pained face warped into that of a ferocious, crazed demon. I glared at my reflection, in which I was gasping for breath like a burdened old cow. I clenched my teeth, put my right foot forwards, and felt pain flare up in my knee and ligaments. My legs were like the broken-down gears of a machine and any minuscule motion created friction between the cogs. It was so painful that I could faint. The five-meter distance between myself and the support felt immeasurably vast.
Sucking in a breath of air, I proceeded to inch my left foot forwards. In my mouth, I could taste the faintly metallic tinge of blood from where I had already bitten through my lip.
As I put my left foot down, I already felt a sense of foreboding. When my heel touched the ground, my leg felt limp and painful, a sensation which was immediately followed by a heart-rending and lung-splitting1 agony. Drowning in the pain, I fought to keep hold of my center of gravity, but I was defeated.
My ears registered the sound of my body crashing heavily to the ground. Really very painful.
Despite being exceedingly careful, I still managed to slip and fall.
In this deserted rehabilitation room, I was actually quite frightened, or you could say uneasy. Every step was so unpredictable, and in any moment I could tumble to the ground again. I was someone who was scared, really scared of pain. And furthermore, all of my fear and suffering was for the sake of this frustratingly slow, extremely difficult progress, was for such an unseemly and inelegant struggle to take just a single, petty, little step.
Only when I fell did the tears brimming in my eyes flow down my face. Lying on my back, eyes raised to the ceiling, I cried silently.
Struggling back up was more even more painful than falling down. The fall and the subsequent pain are instantaneous, but getting up was an endless torment, a bitter misery. By the time I finally managed it I was drenched in sweat, the saltiness of my perspiration flowing from eyebrows to eyelashes. From time to time droplets of sweat landed in my eyes, burning stronger than my own tears.
I messily wiped my face, thinking that just one battle to stand seemed to already exhaust my vitality. But at this moment I was gambling with rest of my life. Each fall only increased my fear of the next, because truthfully in my heart I was a cowardly weakling. If I ever retreated, I knew with certainty that I would never regain the courage to stand back up again.
I inched my left foot forwards again, making an infinitesimally small step, all the while feeling the tremors running through my leg.
When my left foot finally stabilized on the ground, I remembered how to breathe and my heart trembled with emotion. I needed to keep going like this, walking forwards one step at a time, until the day I rediscovered what it was like to to run.
In those five meters, I fell eight times. In that quiet room, one figure tumbled to the ground again and again, and another figure silently crawled back up amidst sweat and tears. There was no audience to applaud at my perseverance, no bouquets of flowers, no spotlight—there was only my loneliness.
When I fell for the last time at the end of those five meters I felt liberated. Even my nerves seemed dulled to the pain. I knew I might have reopened the wound on my lower leg from the way I could feel a warm wetness there and from the faint taste of iron in the air when I inhaled, but I didn’t care at all because I felt like I had finally regained control of my life.
I huddled on the floorboards, curled my arms around my head and silently began to cry. The emotions I had been holding in broke free in that moment and gushed out—the desperation and helplessness I’d felt previously when I worried that I’d never walk again, the fear and dread of facing an unfamiliar world after losing my memories, the disappointment and bitterness when I discovered that no one in the world needed my presence, the false bravado and carefree attitude I masked my panic and weakness in, the discomfort of not knowing how to approach my present and future—all of these feelings poured out of me along with my tears.
I lay on the ground like that, simply crying with whatever strength I had left in me, loudly wailing at the top of my voice. Like I was fighting a battle with myself, I wrestled with all the grievances and fears I had no one to share with and finally defeated the coward in me.
1 In Chinese the phrase “撕心裂肺” translates literally to “heart-tearing, lung-splitting” and is used to indicate extreme pain; grief; etc. I guess an English equivalent might be something like “heart-breaking” or “heart-wrenching” but those are usually more commonly associated with emotional pain, imo.
TL: ALSO we have a bit of a dilemma. I personally enjoy learning Chinese idioms which is why I leave them in somewhat of a literal translation. Niang Niang disagrees with me though and thinks literal translations ruin the flow…what do you guys think??
Niang Niang: Also what do you guys think of having the translation note at the end of the paragraph instead of at the very bottom of the chapter? I imagine the back-and-forth scrolling can get pretty cumbersome.
