excision ovenbird When he was all skinny sun burnt arms and hair that wouldn’t lie flat he had a matchbox car that he loved. But the windows weren’t real. They were stamped on rather than being cut into the aluminum. He wanted real windows. He wanted the car to be like a real car, just smaller. Something perfect. So his step-father cut out windows with a drill, ripping into what had once been whole. And when he got the car back he could see in one side and out the other and the darkness of the hidden interior was suddenly exposed. He hated it. He cried inconsolably. The thing he had loved was ruined, hollowed out and deformed and there was no way to reclaim what he knew, in retrospect, was its imperfect beauty. Almost seventy years later he can still feel the sharp gnawing of loss and despair in the fleshy churn of his stomach. There are cobwebs of regret in his mind that will never be cleared away. I know what it is to be that car. It may be that you also know what it feels like to be altered. Someone takes their unforgiving tools to the parts of you that seem extraneous, or broken, or ugly. They pare away what doesn’t suit them, trying to sculpt you into something that fits their ideal of beauty. But all they succeed in doing is making you less of what you were while destroying everything you loved about your own strange heart. Maybe they regret their actions later, or maybe they move on to some new project, after realizing they cut too far and there’s nothing left to hack at. And then you’re left with a hole that goes straight through your chest so you can see in one side and out the other. And you’re not certain if you’ll ever be the same again. Love should never wield a knife. Has any one of us ever been made better by having a chunk of our soul excised? There’s not enough of me left to risk a razor slipping. Love should look you in the eye and tell you every single thing that makes you beautiful and then say, “more please.” If it aims to make you small, perhaps it is not love at all. 251020 what's it to you? who go blather from