It has now been twelve weeks and one day. Prior to surgery, I knew that twelve weeks on my back would be difficult but I didn't anticipate the complications in between. I knew that I would wish myself dead, but what I didn't anticipate was feeling upset over that wish. In a terrible turn of events, I want to live. Which somehow makes it that much harder. I am desperate to have a normal body - one where I can be present and not worry about pain and discomfort. To put things into perspective, I have been in significant pain for three hundred and seventy-one days. Meaning that in all that time, I never once woke up feeling okay. I find it so, so difficult to come to terms with the fact that I am so far gone inside my own body despite the fact that I never had an injury or an illness. There was a slow decline until my physical therapist advised me to stop walking unless absolutely necessary. The milestone of being out of surgery for twelve weeks means that I should now be feeling human again and I can return to things like sitting down and walking up and down hills and driving and actual physical therapy and swimming and being relatively okay but I'm worried that something is wrong. I don't feel almost okay. My feet and legs and hips and back and neck and shoulders and arms and hands are on fire. My head hurts all the time. I keep trying, and people commend me for somehow having not lost sight of the finish line but honestly, I break down many times a day. I am twenty-eight years old and what the doctors tell me is that I am so young for this to have happened. This I know, but it does not help. While I've been locked away in my bedroom, few people have really come to check in on me. I do not have a lot of friends but I once believed that I had some very good friends. I feel now that that is not the case. I no longer know who to call. Since having had surgery, most people believe that I will now be just fine. Some people don't even understand why I had it in the first place. But surgery was never really necessarily about getting better - it was to prevent me getting worse. I wonder if there'll ever be a day where I can feel my feet again. To stand in a body of water and wiggle my toes and for my brain to comprehend that what is happening is that I am in fact standing in a body of water. I haven't seen the sea this year. I haven't been near the shoreline, the one that I have stood on almost every damn day for over a decade, in all of this year. Yesterday I walked to the red bridge, the first time I walked out of my house since 2017. I stood by the river thinking that I would cry but I couldn't even do that. I'm so far gone. I want my body back.