A disabled memoirist on fairy tales, recovery, and finding a home far from home When I woke up after the accident, it felt like I had stumbled into a story that didn’t want me in it. The room was all white glare and hum, a place outside time. I could breathe, but below the waist there was nothing—no pain, no light, no message returning from the kingdom of legs. In the language of the old tales: a curse had been laid. A prince might sleep for a hundred years; I would wait for a word about whether I would ever walk again. The doctors spoke in riddles that weren’t meant to be riddles. “The MRI will show everything,” which is the kind of line a wizard says as he unrolls a map, not the answer to a human asking if his life is over. On the X-ray, my spine looked like a forest after a storm—one vertebra splintered, bone fragments like a scatter of broken twigs. Somewhere in another story a hero draws a sword from a stone. In mine, a surgeon would slide a titanium plate into my back. Different metal, different myth. What I remember most from those first weeks is the width of the distance. Not just the distance between bed and door or door and outside, but the distance between who I was and the place I now lived. Far and wide: that’s how the spell stretched. Even the simple acts—the sip of water, the turning over, the quiet cry—were quests. I learned that in some tales the hero refuses help and dies; in better tales, they accept a hand. I learned to take the hand. There is a fairy tale about a boy who descends to the underworld to fetch the living water. He walks past doors that promise sleep, past rooms full of feasts, and he does not stop. Rehabilitation is like that. A corridor that lengthens when you enter it. A set of parallel bars that look like a bridge to a country you don’t yet believe exists. You go anyway. You put your weight into your arms and lift. You fail. You return tomorrow. The spell loosens by single grains. I used to hate fairy tales, or at least what they did to bodies like mine. In those stories, a bent foot means a bent soul; a scar marks the villain, the outcast, the monster. Ugly equals bad, and beauty is the passport to a happy ending. They told us in school that the tales were symbols, not instructions. But symbols build houses in the head. You can live there long enough to forget there are other streets. When I became disabled, I learned how quickly other people moved me into those rooms: tragic inspiration, brave survivor, lesson in gratitude, the moral at the end of someone else’s chapter. What saved me—besides surgery, and time, and the stubbornness of the body—were the figures the old books also carried: not the kings and queens, but the helpers. Nurses with midnight voices, who could pass through a curtain like quiet witches and make the beeping stop. Physiotherapists who sounded, frankly, like villains (“Again. Again.”) until you realise villains don’t hold you when you fall. Friends who brought light like talismans: a pair of socks, a poem, a story that didn’t ask me to be anything but myself. Eventually I left the hospital and, later, I left my home. The war in Ukraine turned the map on its head. I crossed borders that had been only lines on screens and became weather. Trains and queues and papers. That’s another fairy tale I dislike: the one where the hero travels and “becomes a man.” I travelled and became someone without a country, then someone with a temporary one. Scotland, with its rain like a long sentence and its hills like old backs, let me in. I am grateful to a place that still believes in libraries. If the early chapters of my story were written by a cruel magician, these later ones were amended by a gentler witch. There were bursaries, improbably: a room at Moniack where the wind wrote on the windows, days at Hawkwood that felt like sunlight being banked for winter. Somebody somewhere said yes to a travel grant and my body—patched together with metal and will—was carried across rivers. Not every tale gives you a fairy godmother; sometimes it gives you a well-run office and a person who reads your email carefully. I have learned to call this magic too. Do I love fairy tales? Not the ones that taught me to fear my face, not the ones that confuse cruelty with justice. But I like the ones that admit how hard it is to come back. The ones where you descend and the world is not waiting for you, where you have to learn to write your name again. I like stories where witches are merely women with knowledge, where wolves are hunger—not evil—and where the forest is not a punishment but a living place you have to learn how to move through. There’s a scene I return to when I write my memoir. I’m at the parallel bars. I have done this dozens, maybe hundreds of times. I have failed; I have cried; I have sworn at the ghosts of saints. The physiotherapist says nothing that belongs on a poster. She says, “Heel first, remember.” I try again. A step is not a symbol. A step is a step. But symbolism is stubborn: it arrives in the room whether you invite it or not. I place my heel down, roll to the ball, shift my weight, place the other heel. Somewhere in the skull, an old door opens. Not the door back to “before.” A door to a new wing of the house. In my country’s stories, a house often stands at the edge of a forest, with a light in one window. This is where the living go to bargain with the dead. It is also where the living go to decide to keep living. On some nights in Glasgow the rain is so thick it becomes a wall you have to lean through. I walk, carefully. I still do not know exactly how the spell was altered—surgery, effort, luck, time—but I know the body is now a negotiated border. I carry a plate of metal in my spine. People sometimes call it a “fix.” I think of it as a hinge. Hinge is a word that admits movement and creak. A door that opens is also a door that can close; a hinge needs oil; the world is not obligated to stay light. But hinges mean we do not have to break the frame to enter another room. When I meet fairy tales now, I ask them to work for their bread. If a story wants my attention, it has to bring me something honest: rooms where disabled bodies are not metaphors for moral failure; kitchens where the talking beasts are not the only ones who can taste joy; roads where the test is not whether you walk without stumbling but whether you keep walking when you do. I don’t think I am a hero. Heroes did not spend months learning how to put on a sock without crying. Heroes do not sit in corridors waiting for numbers to be called, filling out forms whose questions have nowhere to put a life that does not fit. I am not a hero; I am a person who went to the underworld and came back with a single sentence: Still breathing. The title of my book is that sentence because it is not a triumph; it is a practice. You can do it badly and still be doing it. Once, after a long day of standing practice, I lay down and felt the old panic rise—the one that says the body is a trap and you will never be let out. I thought of the boys and girls in the books locked in towers. I thought of the people who came to the foot of the towers with ropes and bread and stories, because you cannot climb rope without something to climb toward. The panic dimmed. Not because I had escaped, but because I remembered that the tower has a door and I have friends who know where it is. That night I slept as if someone had sat by the bed and told me a story that ends, “and tomorrow we try again.” I’m asked sometimes what I would say to the child I was. In the old tales the answer is always an object—sword, mirror, cloak. I would bring a small hinge, heavy for its size, the kind you turn in your hand to feel the work it does. I would say: the door you want will not open all at once. But it will open. It will open enough. About the author:
Luca Ray (Borys Buravchenkov) is a Ukrainian-born memoirist based in Scotland. A disabled writer with a titanium spinal plate, he is at work on Still Breathing, a memoir about paralysis, recovery, and displacement. His work has been supported by Moniack Mhor, Hawkwood, and the Society of Authors.
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