It’s like getting misplaced
in another country. You don’t communicate the language.
You cease
to ask instructions. Individuals say lumbar radiculopathy. Side
hypertrophy
Broad-based disc protrusion. Overlook your vacation spot.
The trick will not be
to really feel self-pity. The best way I do it’s to say my physique
will not be my
physique anymore. It’s another person’s. The ache, subsequently,
is not
mine. I’m merely visiting this bed room the place somebody
I don’t know
lies in ache, ready for dawn. I bend over his physique
and ask
solicitously the place, when, and for a way lengthy it has
damage.
He tells me. We sigh collectively, companionably.
Daybreak comes
slowly. First, the sky whitens. Ghostly timber emerge
like the photographs
on photographic paper within the cease tub
of a darkroom.
You could have a complete new day of ache forward of you.
The sundown from ache’s
window is painted by an artist who dips the best, camel-hair
watercolor brushes
in cochineal, royal purple, amber, tangerine, salmon, uncooked sienna,
burnt umber.
Sky flames. After which its coals cool. A rose glow suffuses
the horizon
just like the traces of a lady’s carmine lipstick on a light-gray
serviette. And now
the painter, grown uninterested in sundown, rinses these blazing brushes
in a transparent glass jar
fof water. All shade dissolves. The water turns to nightfall.
Ache is needy.
What did I do at this time? Talked to it as to a lover.
“How does
that really feel? Is it higher while you lie in your aspect
and put a pillow
between your legs? Curl knees as much as your chest?”
I inform my physique
that we are going to go to dinner tomorrow with two outdated pals.
Will probably be
a Roman dinner. We’ll reenact Pompeii, put on togas,
recline in type
on cushioned couches referred to as lecti—not painful, straight-backed
chairs—within the triclinium,
or formal eating room. We’ll drink a complete bottle of cabernet.
Or fairly my pals
will drink the wine for me, since I can’t combine alcohol with
the medication I’m on.
They’re good medication. We’ll have some enjoyable earlier than Vesuvius blows.
