I don’t know how long we were there.
I let all of it hit at once.
At some point, both girls quieted. They had cried themselves into a still, heavy kind of sleep, and now they were just warm weight against my chest.
I looked at their faces in the yellow light of the nursery, and I made them a promise out loud, even though they couldn’t understand a single word of it: “You are not going anywhere, sweethearts. Neither am I.”
***
The next three years were the most demanding and the most defining of my life.
My mother moved in for the first year. We developed a rhythm. I learned to move through the world differently than I had before, and in the process of adapting, I started sketching something I had been thinking about since the first week of my rehabilitation.
“You are not going anywhere, sweethearts. Neither am I.”
The joint mechanism in my prosthesis was functional but inefficient. The prosthetic worked, but not well enough. It hurt and slowed me down. So I started fixing it.
