by LJ Jensen

Orion

LJ Jensen | June 2026 | Issue 52

Essay

It’s been years since top surgery, and my chest is still numb. The nerve endings never healed. I picture the skin outside my heart woven together with fraying fibers, twisted and unkempt. I can sense pressure, but all else disappears on contact. A red hot shower, an over-washed band t-shirt, the chipped edge of a coffee mug balanced on my chest while turning the page of a book. My own hands—it all turns to sand, swept clean in the presence of my skin.

Before the surgery, a trans friend instructed me to stand in the mirror for a few minutes every day once the bandages came off.

“Touch every part of your chest and watch,” he said.

He instructed me to dictate my movements while looking at my reflection. Now I am touching the skin below my collarbone. Now I am touching my sternum. This, he told me, would help my brain start to recognize my body again. When I was finally free of the compression binders and surgical tape, the drains and stitches, I tried the technique only once. I couldn’t watch my fingers as they brushed my body with no sensation on the other side. It was an unrequited love between hands and skin, a call with no answer.

After top surgery, I’ve lived in my body with a comfort I never thought imaginable: chest flattened, a single scar that hangs from armpit to armpit like a wire clothesline. I take pictures of myself without a shirt. I walk around my apartment naked. But still, I am trying to make sense of the numbness, which is not a lack of feeling in itself. Numbness is static, and plush. A body stuck in the moment of anticipation before a desire is fulfilled.

Years later and my skin is patient. It waits, wants.

*

The word desire can be traced to Latin, desideare, from the phrase de sidere, or of the star. According to one etymology database, the phrase in context may have meant “awaiting what the stars will bring.”

Before the surgery, a star called Betelgeuse—that aging, blood-soaked star in the chest of Orion—ejected enough gas off its surface to create a dust storm in its atmosphere over a hundred million miles wide. The dust storm clouded our view of the star for months, an event that astronomers call the Great Dimming.

“One hundred million miles of dust” is not something my human brain can envision. I picture a field of dandelion seed heads thrashing in a storm. I remember that the word dandelion comes from the French, dent de lion, lion’s tooth, and the image transforms to tufts of fur, tumbling off a breezy tail. I try to imagine the violence of an astronomical explosion, but my mind only reaches for softness.

To fall asleep with my dog curled on my flattened chest. To tell my friends I love them with my hands splayed out evenly against my heart. To brave Brooklyn humidity in dead summer, a rare breeze trekking my spine. To tip my head backwards in the lake behind my parents’ home and watch beads of water gather at my sternum, a lake within my body within a lake, while staring up into the sky of stars that bleed and burn out and blow open. While awaiting surgery, this is what I want.

*

Orion is the only constellation I see out my kitchen window in Brooklyn; while healing, I touched my chest and watched him. The edges of us, blurred. Our scars smiled at each other. We massaged them with oils and jade rollers and ice; we whispered them to sleep. We share in this gift of a hard-won chest that knows the possibilities of black holes, of supernovae. My skin is not cured of desire, but made of it.

Orion and I, our numb bodies forever in empty space, asking for more.

LJ Jensen is a non-fiction writer. Their essays can be found in The Rumpus, Catapult, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. They are an alum of Kenyon Writers Workshop and McCormack Oregon Summer Workshop (formerly Tin House), and a recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Millay Arts, and Nes Artist Residency in Iceland. They live in Brooklyn, NY with their dog.