Phantom Pains

“Some of us wear a prosthesis,” writes Rochelle L. Johnson, an environmental studies professor. “But all of us are amputated.” Johnson’s personal essay for The Georgia Review, winner of the journal’s annual prose prize, braids her shifting work as an educator, navigating her students’ senses of planetary decline, with the loss of her leg, removed due to a longtime medical condition. Considered together, these two experiences challenge conventional ideas about the boundaries of the body. Here, phantom pain is evidence that “nature never forgets what it has been.”

These many years later, my goodbye goes on, because the ghost-limb speaks to me every moment. With each movement, I feel my body doing the work of propelling me on a partial leg. My ghost-limb accompanies me like an eradicated mammal might accompany a nineteenth-century man walking through a landscape severed of parts of its own being. Or like a vanished birdsong might sing to a woman wandering in a meadow. Or like a home might beckon a college student, filling her young heart with the hope of a future return to that place she knows she once was, where she always thought she was meant to be.