My Dad Carried the Fingers in a Bag / Gabe, Artist

Yeah, I think I’ve always grown up and I’ve had these indents in my two fingers on my left hand, and I kind of started questioning what they were about at some point. And I asked my mom, “Why do I have these two parts of my fingers that are pushed in?” They look like they’re smooshed. I don’t have a lot of feeling in these parts of the fingers either. And I thought it was just something like from birth, but she was like, oh no, actually, when you were about five or six, we were leaving the house and you were an exhausting child in general. And she was just very tired that day. And she went back to close the door and I went back at the same moment and the door slammed on my hand and it ended up severing the two tips of my fingers. They came off in the door.

And I remember this image of this metal door, this white metal door kind of going back at me. And then I don’t remember anything from the next couple of days because my fingers had come off. And apparently, my dad carried the fingers in a bag, in a plastic bag to the hospital, and to UCLA, it was in LA. And it was some sort of miraculous surgery that they performed to attach the fingers and some of the nerves back together, I guess they hadn’t done that specific surgery before there, but I just kind of remember being in and out of a sort of a haze at this hospital.

And I think they had to strap me down to the bed or something too, to do this because I was small. And so, at one point I had no fingers, but now they’re back. And it just always just kind of perplexed me because I can’t feel if I touch the tips of them, nothing is there, but I managed to play violin for 18 years still with these fingers. I wonder if they had helped me in some way, but it’s weird to have part of your body be removed and then it reattached. And to know that they were like, traveled separately from me, in some ways interesting, like that they were in a different location than I was at some point.