Relationship Surgery

Brenna Koenig is currently an Embedded Tutor in the English Department at California State University Northridge, where she is completing her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature (Honors). She has previously worked as a supplemental instructor by co-teaching various levels of composition, rhetoric, and literary analysis to first-year college students. Outside of teaching and tutoring, she has written about a variety of literary topics that encompass both American and British literature in the form of novels, short stories, and poetry. She has also been published in the CSUN Sigma Tau Delta literary magazine, The Scarlet Review.

relationship surgery

Patients usually ask why we begin the operation on the hands,

so I tell them: “well, that’s where the disease usually starts”.

Most people think it dawns in the atriums of the heart,

the wrinklings of the brain,

or the lobes of the liver;

but really, the hands are the first to go.

Too often, people forget that their hands

hold much more than car keys and cell phones;

they hold memories.

Like the way he massaged my shoulder blades during candlelit baths.

They hold more than vanilla-scented chapsticks and crumpled up receipts.

Like the time we stayed up all night tracing freckles until we found our favorite.

They hold more than dinner utensils and door handles.

Like my fingertips caressing the small of his back when we made love on the floor.

They hold memories composed of everything (and everyone)

that you’ve ever touched;

ones that seep into the skin,

filling the crevices of every cuticle,

finding a home underneath the innermost recesses of your fingernail beds.

This is where they live.

It’s only when a healthy heart suddenly becomes a broken one,

that they start their inevitable decay.

They start their dissolution, a corruption of the soul at the cellular level.

Once cherished, now discarded memories start to ooze and bleed, they instigate infection–

An infection of the spirit, one that remains unlinked to bodily funguses or disease.

But when either affliction is left untreated,

they fester all the same.

I tell patients about these tangible records, these lingering moments that

have become trapped beneath the fingernails

of every person who has touched,

or been touched,

by another human’s existence in this world.

“This is why we start with the hands”, I say.

They hold more than car keys.

Brenna Koenig is currently an Embedded Tutor in the English Department at California State University Northridge, where she is completing her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature (Honors). She has previously worked as a supplemental instructor by co-teaching various levels of composition, rhetoric, and literary analysis to first-year college students. Outside of teaching and tutoring, she has written about a variety of literary topics that encompass both American and British literature in the form of novels, short stories, and poetry. She has also been published in the CSUN Sigma Tau Delta literary magazine, The Scarlet Review. Her research interests include, but are not limited to: the problematic conceptions of women in nineteenth-century domestic novels, applying gender, psychoanalytic, and Marxist criticism to canonical gothic works, as well as the lasting influence of the Holocaust on Jewish-American Literature and identity. As an avid reader, writer, and burgeoning teacher; Brenna continue to spread her passion for literature inside and outside the classroom.