dispatches from the pandemic: The part that grows back

When I was a kid, I watched X-Men on Saturday mornings.

I know that sounds like the beginning of a normal story, but stay with me. It gets strange quickly.

Before X-Men, I was sometimes on a local kids’ news show produced by the FOX affiliate in my hometown. It was called KidZone, and children did the reporting. This was my first taste of show business, if you can call it that: standing in front of a camera, holding a microphone, and feeling the bizarre little charge of being part of something that would later appear on a screen.

But before my tiny local television career came on, there were the mutants.

Wolverine was the one I kept coming back to.

He had regenerative powers. Cut him and the wound closed. Break him and he healed. The cartoon did not get especially gruesome, because it was Saturday morning and presumably some adult in Standards and Practices still believed children should not watch a man be skinned alive between cereal commercials. But the implication was always there.

You could hurt him almost endlessly.

He would grow back.

As a kid, I never understood why he was so angry.

That changed after a dream.

I was barely a teenager when I had one of those dreams that does not feel like a dream while it is happening. It felt like days. Maybe weeks. Maybe years. Time became elastic in that cruel way dreams can manage, where the mind builds a whole lifetime and then destroys it before morning.

In the dream, I died in a car accident.

There was a white light at first. The kind people talk about. Then it disappeared.

A red light replaced it. Heat came with it. Groans. A terrible understanding.

I was raised Catholic, so I knew the architecture immediately.

Hell.

I stood in line with other damned souls and waited to find out what would happen to me. When I reached the front, I was shown a book that listed my fears. Water. Snakes. Needles. Heights.

My punishment was built from the inventory.

I was dropped over and over into boiling water, unable to swim. Snakes bit me. Needles were jabbed into me again and again. My body was destroyed, restored, and destroyed again. I drowned. I burned. I scarred. The pain did not end. It intensified.

And somewhere inside that nightmare, I understood Wolverine.

Not the claws. Not the cool leather jacket. Not the gruff one-liners.

The rage.

If pain cannot kill you, it still changes you.

If you are forced to heal over and over, healing stops feeling like mercy. It becomes another stage of the punishment. A reset button for the next wound.

Eventually, in the dream, there was a clerical error.

That is how I remember it. A cosmic paperwork problem. Until things could be sorted out, I was sent to limbo.

Limbo was a white room without walls, like the loading program in The Matrix before The Matrix existed in my life. Nothing as far as the eye could see. No gravity. No objects. No weather. Just absence.

Then a voice told me the error had been corrected.

I could enter paradise.

The white room filled with warm light. The pain left my body. Hundreds of people appeared, including my grandfather, who had already died. I did not recognize most of the faces, but I knew them as family. They welcomed me. They held me one by one.

Then I woke up.

It was Saturday morning.

The sun was up. I went upstairs, sat in front of the television, and watched cartoons.

X-Men was on.

For the first time, I did not see Wolverine as a cool angry guy with claws. I saw him as someone trapped in a cycle of injury and repair. Someone whose body survived things his mind still had to carry.

Then I made the mistake of telling my parents about the dream.

My mother was deeply religious, and in our house the supernatural was not metaphor. It was active. Present. Operational. When I misbehaved, Satan was involved. When I struggled in school, Satan was involved. When I tried to throw a rock over a school bus and broke a window instead, Satan had apparently taken an interest in trajectory.

So when I described a vivid dream about heaven, hell, punishment, and paradise, it did not get filed under “young teenager has intense dream because his brain is full of hormones, fear, imagination, and Catholic imagery.”

It became an event.

Instead of lunch, we went to church.

I sat with a priest and told him what I had seen. He said it might be proof that God was speaking through me. That perhaps there was nothing saying I had not actually died. That I might be meant for the priesthood.

I was thirteen.

What I learned was not that I had a religious calling.

What I learned was that my inner life was dangerous to other people.

The stories that came out of me were not treated as imagination. They were evidence. Evidence of demons. Evidence of destiny. Evidence of something adults needed to interpret, correct, contain.

So I stopped telling them.

That did not mean the stories stopped.

They kept coming. Stories of heaven and hell. Time travel. Space travel. Dreams where dead people returned and I tried to catch them up on everything they had missed. Dreams where my mother or my brother were alive and waiting for me to explain the shape of the world without them in it.

The mind does not stop making images because you are afraid of what people will say.

It just learns to hide them.

For a while, my parents tried to give that energy somewhere to go. Theater camp. Drama club. Choir. Creative writing. Places where the strange machinery inside me could be seen as talent instead of threat.

Then life happened.

My mother was in a catastrophic accident. My family changed overnight. The future became urgent. Practical. Heavy.

There was no more time for the part of me that wanted to make things. I needed to become serious. A teacher. A lawyer. A professional. Someone useful. Someone with a job title that made sense to adults who had survived enough to distrust dreams.

So I tried to kill the creative part of myself.

Here is the problem with that part:

It grows back.

And when it grows back, it is angry.

Every time I told myself I would never be a writer, it returned. Every time I told myself filmmaking was a hobby, it returned. Every time I tried to build a normal life with no room for expression, the stories came back louder, stranger, more insistent.

That is why I understand Wolverine.

He is not just a fantasy of strength. He is a fantasy of survivorship. A body that will not stay broken. A wound that keeps closing even when the person inside it is exhausted. A man made furious by the fact that pain did not have the decency to finish him.

For me, hell is not fire.

Hell is being unable to create.

Hell is the white room with nothing in it. No words. No images. No people making impossible things together. No half-formed idea keeping me awake. No scene that will not leave me alone. No strange dream becoming a page, then a script, then maybe someday a film.

I spent years trying to be a serious person.

The artist kept growing back.

There are plenty of people who found their way later than they thought they should have. Bukowski did not become traditionally successful until his fifties. Stan Lee was almost forty when he published his first major comic work. Billy Bob Thornton was forty-one when Sling Blade changed his life.

These examples are not excuses to wait.

They are reminders not to mistake a late start for a dead end.

I am writing because if I do not, something in me starts to rot. I am writing because the stories never stopped. I am writing because the part I tried to kill came back with teeth.

Maybe that is not a clean origin story.

Good.

I do not trust the clean ones.