Bone Memories

I BROKE MY ankle on a Friday evening in January, exactly three months after moving to America. Eight weeks after that, in a related but different kind of fracture, I would see my father for the first time in fifteen years.

I should have seen the first injury coming for a few reasons. One of the simpler ones: the urge to assimilate. A good immigrant knows both the importance and the urgency of this. And in sports-obsessed Colorado, blending in meant either scaling mountains or skiing down their sheer slopes. And these, I would learn, sooner or later meant injury.

What I would also realize as I fell six feet from the climbing wall, my left foot emitting a sharp “pop” as it drove into the thick padding covering the gym floor, is that the physical body is largely beyond our conscious understanding. I had forgotten that it could hold memory and violence, in ligaments, muscles, and bones, in ways and spaces that our minds have only the faintest awareness of.

INJURIES MAKE you withdraw, make you burrow into yourself. You try to hide, away from curious glances and questions (“Had a little accident, did you?”) that constantly remind you of your brokenness—as if you could forget. You try to become invisible (a good immigrant knows a lot about this too).

For the first month that I was on crutches, I barely saw anyone, choosing to work from home. When I wasn’t working, I watched episode after episode of , the hollow characters and their loneliness at once mirroring my own and emptying my mind of thought. I managed to avoid thinking, for example, about whether I had made a good decision in leaving Canada, swapping universal healthcare and a stable if monotonous life for a more interesting job and a chance to start over in a place where I knew no one, and more importantly, no one knew me. Like many who move, I had hoped to discover a better version of myself elsewhere—one who climbed literal mountains, perhaps. At twenty-nine, I did