Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 90404 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 452(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 301(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90404 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 452(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 301(@300wpm)
And I am far from healthy, as my mother, fiancé—well, ex-fiancé—and everyone else around me tried to remind me when I first told them about using my savings to go to the three most promising sites around the world where it’s rumored miracles have happened.
As if they have to remind me of my body’s limitations. Why can’t they understand? That’s the entire point!
I wake every day with pain that wracks my unnaturally curved spine, and spasms that cramp my legs. My childhood was nothing but surgeries and yet still, my body refuses to cooperate. I’m always in the losing percentile, even with the best doctors.
My mother didn’t know what to do with me. She supported me as best she could, but my father left us not long after my diagnosis and the first surgery. Mom started carrying a thermos of wine with her everywhere she went after that. A beauty pageant queen, she’d considered it her life’s highest ambition to become a trophy wife. But then I came along—a poisonous combination of her and my dad’s genes—ruining everything.
One night I came out to get a glass of water after she’d got really sauced, and she sat me down beside her on the couch, eyes red.
“Look honey, so you’ll never be beautiful, let’s just face facts,” she said, reaching for her large coffee cup that declared “World’s Best Mom”—a Mother’s Day gift from my father a few years before he took off. She uses it for wine when she is at home. “But if you work hard enough, you can still be useful.” Then she laughed humorlessly. “And really most of them just want a warm hole to stick it in, anyway.”
She can only see a woman’s worth defined by whether she can catch a man. And by that definition… well what is the point of me?
So, I think she was more surprised than anyone when I came home and told her about Drew. Drew isn’t just any man, either. He is successful and handsome, and for some reason no one around me seems to be able to fathom—including her after she met him—he’d wanted me.
So, my mother was absolutely furious with me when I broke off the engagement to go in search of my miracle.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she’d raged at me as I stopped back home to pick up a suitcase. I certainly didn’t have any of those at Drew’s place. Even though we lived together for two years, I still think of it that way—as Drew’s place. “You’re ruining everything! Go back and grovel. He’ll take you back, I bet. He’s such a good man. He’ll take pity on you.”
Take pity.
Her words lit me up inside with burning rage. “Take pity?” I seethed, so angry I could barely see straight.
But, of course, that’s what she thinks. That I should be glad to scrabble for whatever scraps of kindness I can get from this world, take the forty years of life my condition might afford me with gratitude before my weak heart gives out, and then die with grace so everyone else can go back to their regularly scheduled programming without any more fuss.
Except that lately I’ve become a creature of rage. Very unbecoming of a petite disabled woman.
And I’ve decided that, fuck it. if conventional medicine won’t work, why not try the miraculous? I am twenty-five and still able to walk with my rollator walker and occasionally my arm crutches, but in another year or two, I’ll be in a wheelchair. If I am going to try this, it has to be now.
Maybe some god or spirit will have pity on my poor, broken body if no one else will. So I finished stuffing that suitcase with clothing and went for the nuclear option even though no one in my life supported me. I started traveling in search of a miracle.
First, I visited a basilica in Ireland where the Mother Mary is said to appear. It is a simple but beautiful church, and when I visited the holy statue that is the place of miracles, I did feel quite at peace.
The monks prayed over me, and I held vigil for three days and nights, waiting for my miracle.
But I was not healed.
So then I went to India, to visit the Jwalamukhi Temple. Travel is much more difficult there, being constantly jostled, but I managed. All the things I’ve been told my whole life I can’t do—I managed. Yes, I lost my balance and fell plenty. But I got back up again.
The temple is beautiful. Beyond anything I could imagine. Nine eternal flames burn continually from stone in sacred spots throughout the structure. There is no recordable source of the fire, but they have still been burning since time immemorial. The flames are said to be part of fifty-one remnants of a girl of fire, who happened upon the spot where fire flamed brightly from the gods to banish a mounting attack of devils.