Crafting the Perfect Scab

Originally written by Valerie Williams-Sanchez on Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:29pm. Modified for posting at date.
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It was the Fall.
That was when the announcement went out:"Bring Your Son/Daughter to Work Day."
I'm intellectualizing pain, again, a process that makes ya sorta numb, eventually. You know, it's like picking and poking at a wound…
I've ruminated months over it ever since. Considering what I would do, and how I would handle the day and the absence of my daughter. Through the result of a series of life twists and turns, I find myself working far away from, across the country, in fact, my 14-year-old daughter. You see, my employer, and subsequently my job, relocated to the opposite coast as my family and home at a time when the local and State economy was in a recession and unemployment rates were at historic highs. To keep my job, I had to move, a scenario, I'm learning through my travels is more common than I previously thought.
Got one on my left elbow. I slid down the stairs where I'm staying here on the East Coast. It was late, I was loaded down with bags and stuff …

Not without friends locally, it can still be tough going. I miss my kid terribly and considered staying home, today, in protest of the circumstances and situation that has led to the separation. But, I decided to come to work today, anyway. 
It could be far worse, for sure.
This latest fall, however, brought to mind once when I slid down iced-over subway stairs out in Brooklyn, covering a story, years ago as grad student. It was a tough story, eye-opening in many ways to the bitter poverty, bleakness, and aggressive hope that can exist in the blizzardous, dead-of- winter in a Northeastern ghetto…

And, after thinking it through, I don't wanna waste a good sick day. It is one I could use to be somewhere I really need or want to be – if not recovering from the flu, I'm thinking the Caribbean--maybe, someday?
Besides, these kids here today, I rationalized with myself to realize, aren't my kid. Neither are they any of the 250 group home kids I worked with for nearly 10 years--a story to be told on another occasion.
I ended up with a great big bruise on the hip that bore the brunt of the impact. I was sore and hurting for a long time. But looking at my left elbow today, …
And so, I really have to let go of whatever anger, resentment, frustration or anxiety I have over the whole thing. One has nothing to do with the other.
Right.
So, here I am. Funny, it is sort of like one of Ludacris's lyrics, I heard for the first time recently. It goes: "Just have some prune juice and let the 's-h-%-&' go!" Poetic, too, in a different, more 'urban' (I really do loathe the euphemism) way, the sentiment in the rap lyric echoes that of another song that has recently conquered the billboard charts: "This too shall pass."

...it occurred to me…
The real trick to the healing process, I suppose, is to do it just right. So that in the end, like a scab, the pain will simply fall away, without even leaving a scar.

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Notes: Continuing my personal exploration of the writing process, the written space and its effect on messaging in my own work, this story looks to exploit the space between paragraphs, the process points of transition, that go together to create a cohesive tale. The story attempts to show how an unwritten memory influences the current, articulated thought, to create a new layer of narrative. The subtext, in blue, is the chord  and theme which in its conclussion reflects the fullnes of a complete and harmonized thought: the pain of the various "falls" successfully deconstructed, healed, made whole with forward-looking hope.

(c) 2010 Valerie Williams-Sanchez