Lilly

My parents watch me like hawks, like I’m on the tail end of my infancy instead of my teenage years. Mom looks like she wants to applaud when I limp, barefoot and ungainly and free, out of my room and across the house. She doesn’t, thankfully. It doesn’t feel like that much of a victory. It’s just a step. I used to be capable of thousands on end.

What feels better is when I lace my right foot into a high top for the first time in months and yell that I’m leaving and go to meet my friends at the library, my steps already more fluid than they were that first day. What feels better is when I’m home alone and I keep those high tops on so I can dance in my room again, my ankle twisting with my body and bearing my weight without pain. What feels better is walking up stairs, and down stairs, and across the dangerously uneven front lawn, and being able to flex my ankle further and further every day, and watching my long-neglected calf muscle begin to bulge beneath my skin again.

It’s felt like a long journey and it’s strange to think that it’s only been a few months. But already the only memory of the surgery is the two stiff pink lines that draw a V on the side of my ankle and a lingering caution to my steps as my ankle rolls inside my shoe. It’s taken up so much of my life for the past several weeks that now, on the brink of full recovery, I hardly know what to do with myself. You mean I can walk? Anywhere? I can go back to P.E., and shower standing up, and cuff my jeans the way I like them because one leg won’t be stuffed inside a boot? It’s practically a foreign concept.

Last winter, I promised my physical therapist that I’d stay away for as long as I could—guess I didn’t make it as far as I thought. But the roads will be icy soon, and I’ll want to walk them confidently. My goal all along has been “running again by the new year,” and it looks like I just might make it. I can see the light. I’m almost there. I’m almost done. ♦