You pick up the pieces. If you’re lucky you find most of them, and if you’re very lucky you find enough to assemble something that vaguely resembles what you were. The kind of four-leaf-clover-in-a-rabbit’s-foot luck you’d need to get it all back in one bright shiny piece is something you don’t even dare dream.
You’re missing something. You will always be missing something – a sense of security, perhaps, or the certainty of your own rectitude. Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe you don’t have the heart for the fight any more, and you hang up your sword and sling your shield over your slumping shoulders. Let someone else take the arrows for a while. Let someone else rescue the damsel, slay the dragon, and put that windmill in its place. Or maybe you just can’t imagine winning: you know the word is there, hanging on a nail by the door, but you don’t dare wear it.
It’s okay. The soul remembers what the body has long forgotten – how to shed a tail and regrow it. How to make a new limb – maybe not the same as the old one, but it balances you just the same.
