Lots of memories...
Aug. 21st, 2025 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chicatingwhen I chose my wheelchairs as an Object to write about.(There was a time when I'd never do that, btw.)
The latest one wasn’t close to the first chair. That one was tiny and blue and made everyone cry. This one was black and may have been the fifteenth or the twentieth—growing while wheeling made the totals mount up—she barely remembers. There’s almost always been one
.She liked it better when they weren’t new—it made her feel that she had lots of adventures. Anyway, they don’t stay nice very long. Battered armrests, crumbs from dinners on the bottom. She doesn’t remember when buying a new one stopped coming with a side of hope that almost made it worth facing the car salesman types in the showroom, or the other patrons whose disabilities made her feel strange.
Even knowing a lot of disabled people, there was always something she hadn’t seen before, up to and including the sales guys’ clumsy “moves” on her mom, or maybe the accompanying therapist.(This, in addition to Paul Lynde, might be how she finds out what “gay” is. Maybe. The women who don’t respond. But maybe not—mom didn’t bite either. )
This is how she learned that some women said yes to guys with hair up their noses. Usually she and Mom would be tense and fight in the car about nothing on the way home—there was always plenty of time, because she has never lived close to the wheelchair store.
They both hoped, for a long time that every chair, or just the year passing, might have taken something off her huge list of Can’t’s but after a few in high school, it didn’t happen. She wasn’t sure when the hope stopped.
Maybe when the electric chair let her cover a lot of ground without making her life easier, and she went back to acoustic, which, like, quitting OT and PT was kind of a thrilling thing that wasn’t supposed to happen and was supposed to make her feel bad instead. She was a nice young woman back then and tried hard. Sometimes she talked herself into feeling bad about those things, but even without being “ nice” she is sometimes sad that people don’t have bright ideas for her anymore, even though having Mom pick chairs online is easier.
The latest one wasn’t close to the first chair. That one was tiny and blue and made everyone cry. This one was black and may have been the fifteenth or the twentieth—growing while wheeling made the totals mount up—she barely remembers. There’s almost always been one
.She liked it better when they weren’t new—it made her feel that she had lots of adventures. Anyway, they don’t stay nice very long. Battered armrests, crumbs from dinners on the bottom. She doesn’t remember when buying a new one stopped coming with a side of hope that almost made it worth facing the car salesman types in the showroom, or the other patrons whose disabilities made her feel strange.
Even knowing a lot of disabled people, there was always something she hadn’t seen before, up to and including the sales guys’ clumsy “moves” on her mom, or maybe the accompanying therapist.(This, in addition to Paul Lynde, might be how she finds out what “gay” is. Maybe. The women who don’t respond. But maybe not—mom didn’t bite either. )
This is how she learned that some women said yes to guys with hair up their noses. Usually she and Mom would be tense and fight in the car about nothing on the way home—there was always plenty of time, because she has never lived close to the wheelchair store.
They both hoped, for a long time that every chair, or just the year passing, might have taken something off her huge list of Can’t’s but after a few in high school, it didn’t happen. She wasn’t sure when the hope stopped.
Maybe when the electric chair let her cover a lot of ground without making her life easier, and she went back to acoustic, which, like, quitting OT and PT was kind of a thrilling thing that wasn’t supposed to happen and was supposed to make her feel bad instead. She was a nice young woman back then and tried hard. Sometimes she talked herself into feeling bad about those things, but even without being “ nice” she is sometimes sad that people don’t have bright ideas for her anymore, even though having Mom pick chairs online is easier.
