Dear aliens,
Long ago, I stubbed my big toe. I was cooking with my infant son strapped to my chest. The wiggly baby made it even harder. Our kitchen, in the basement of a beautiful, hundred-year-old Berkeley house, was bathed in sunset light for at least an hour every day. The light delighted some of my senses, but the charm of the rudimentary equipment, materials, and layout had its limits. The stove was older than me. The doorless doorway to the adjacent, pocket-sized bathroom was lower than me. I bumped my head countless times. Moving through it felt like Bill Murray in Japan in Lost in Translation (great movie, by the way). After chopping some vegetables on our improvised kitchen island, which the baby's feet almost kicked away, I turned toward the ancient appliance. With my feet half out of view, I hit the metal. My emotional fuel tank emptied. I got flooded. Out of rage, I kicked again. Same foot. Same spot. The baby felt it all and started crying. At the moment of impact, the pain was sharp. In the mnemonic soup of my recollection, I remember sensing something break inside. With baby and veggies requiring immediate attention, I shlepped away limping. I'm a tall, lanky creature. Navigating a small space requires extra spatial awareness, even more so to offset my cartoonesque clumsiness. This kind of bump happens all the time.
But this one was different. My toe swelled and turned purple for a week. I kept walking as normally as possible, and only saw a doctor two or three weeks later. Stubbed toes are like a cold. After a quick inspection, nothing critical was detected. « Rest. Ice. Compress. Elevate. You'll be fine. Give it a few weeks. » In hindsight, I should have done a better job of reducing the pressure. The color faded and the swelling went down, but my toe remained somewhat swollen. As I compared both sides regularly, I became weirded out by the sight of the big guy on the right. Surely it was not bent or broken, but it was clearly not normal. Because I'm a tough guy, I kept walking on it. A year later, I mentioned it during my yearly checkup and was offered an X-ray.
« Yup, that's broken, sir—in two places, » said the X-ray technician. Tough news for a bipedal mammal. A few days later, I got a report with the proper medical jargon: bilateral intra-articular fracture of the distal phalanx. The doctor who gave me the official spiel told me that I had two options: surgery or do nothing. Surgery was not a guaranteed fix with a risk of early arthritis. He also took a remarkable amount of care to explain to me how imperfect and messy orthopedic surgery is. He left me with a simple recommendation: learn to live with it. It's a healthy exercise and can become a profound experience that teaches you to develop a better relationship with your body as it ages. Time has given his words a lot of resonance. I've been stepping on a broken toe for years now. Some days it bothers me. Intolerable pain is rare. The sucker is a bit ugly. The nail is slightly deformed. My gait has adapted. I don't run as much but remain active. I guess all humans have an equivalent. It's a healthy shock to hear, for the first time, that something will never really fully heal. Mortality hit. The message registered, but idiocy persisted.
As of today, the consensus is that the locus of our humanity is on the other side of the ship: in the brain. That may be partially right. But my big toe told me it has a lot to do with it too. You may not have a big toe. Delicate roots, perhaps. Tentacles. Gas clouds. Something I can't even perceive. May you have a nice, healthy one. If that all makes sense to you—hello, sentient friend.