The Names of Things

I was talking, the other day, about the gross anatomy lab. It's come up in my mind several times in the past few days. It's a weird time in a girl's life, the semester she spends pent up with cadavers on weekends and late at night, holding organs in her hand, trying to figure out how everything goes together.

I'm forgetting the things that I learned back then, taking apart Edna and putting her together. I am forgetting the names of things. There are so many of them, inside us -- so many things, named long ago by the men who first took us apart.

The ones I remember best are the ones named after objects. Pes anserinus, the goose's foot where three tendons come together. The sella turcica, the Turk's saddle that holds the key to the door we unlock between childhood and adulthood. The falciform ligament, sickle-shaped and slicing across the liver. Pterion, the weak wing of our skull, the place where we are the most vulnerable. Two muscles twisted together like twins.

And then the brain, the organ that most fascinates me because it is the key to everything. In my head, I wander around my brain and wonder where things sometimes go wrong, spark out. Does my mental illness lie in the star-shaped cells that dot the sky of my consciousness? What goes wrong with the bitter almond of my emotion?

And what about my memories, wild and sweet, when they are swept out to sea?