All important life events feel like a haze afterwards, I've learned, with this being no exception. With not much else to do other than salvage what little they could of my right arm, and tie off the end into a nasty little thing of a stump, it looked on the outside to be a quick recovery.

But inside, the head turns in turmoil. I sat in front of a mirror in the room, merely playing with that little of what I had of the stump. Turning it a bit -- halfway through the shoulder and elbow, feeling it with the other arm. I had already overheard a discussion over the walls. Either I would obtain a prosthetic, or be retired, but for now, a horrific limbo. I had already been shut in this room for a while, and probably for a few more days to stew like this.

I continuied to touch that stump. That constant reminder, for the rest of my life, of what would happen. When I was discharged so quickly after regaining consciousness back then, with back then not even being that long but feeling so, so long, I was given a small white ribbon around the remainer. It stayed there, still. Claw brushed against it, yanked, and then without even realizing, the ribbon came undone from the circle knot, falling to my knee, sitting there, lifeless, as lifeless and pathetic a life I felt like I had now.

The person I saw in the mirror didn't feel like myself anymore. A garbled body that I merely resided in, perhaps. An ugly face, dark eyes, eyebags, the works of the devil and depths emerging from the head in the form of horns as red as the blood they cleaned up from where I had lost everything. I had lost everything there. Stable job, stable everything. Even my head felt a bit looser. If that ribbon was on my neck, my head would be on the floor from how discombobulated everything felt at this very moment.