I can no longer remember where I was when it happened, only that it happened, it must have happened. Sometimes we cry silent recordings in our bones, or guts, or maybe it is our hips that are the primary storehouses for extracts and tanking. Our bodies harden with history, we become wax figures to our own sclerotic effigies: the hips know. Hips don’t lie. They are, as the doctor suggested—our filing cabinet drawers.
Old people who fall and break their hips open the floodgates to regret and despair, to the molasses of grief. It is not just the busted hip that needs mending, it is an entire psychic geography as outlined by the hip, a pivotal ambassador. The breaking of a hip places us squarely where we are with ourselves. The pain that comes is the pain of your daughter’s first heartbreak and how she mourned into the softness of your spongy core, your fortress. The pain is the mother who once forgot you at the gas station during a road trip, you timeless in the bathroom, and she, swept along by a bullying row of time—jostling, impatient—speeding her up no matter what the context or rate of motion, and it is your hips that held the gremlins of being forgotten, your hips as judge and jury to your mother’s thoughtless negligence—your hips declared her guilty, on that and other counts, but no one ever heard your hips issue that declaration, you never heard the verdict charged by your hips … if only your hips had large lips, if only your hips belonged to a choir … yet all remained unspoken, a cold case quivering in a strongbox slotted in a furnace.
John Biscello 