Fibromatosis

Somewhere in your muscle tissue, something is growing that does not belong there. Not a tumour in the threatening sense. Not cancer. But connective tissue that has begun to proliferate — tough, fibrous, knotted. It weaves itself between muscle fibres, deposits in layers, hardens what should be mobile. Sometimes you can feel it: a thickening beneath the skin, a strand that cannot be massaged away. It is benign. And it still feels as though your body is walling something in.

Medicine calls it fibromatosis — a proliferation of fibrous tissue with no clear cause, no typical trigger. Sometimes in the hands, sometimes in the abdominal wall, sometimes deep between the muscles, sometimes in the foot. Doctors observe, sometimes operate, often wait. And you go home with a body that has grown harder somewhere — quieter, denser, as if sealed.