It’s like getting misplaced
abroad. You don’t converse the language.
You cease
to ask instructions. Folks say lumbar radiculopathy. Side
hypertrophy
Broad-based disc protrusion. Neglect your vacation spot.
The trick shouldn’t be
to really feel self-pity. The way in which I do it’s to say my physique
shouldn’t be my
physique anymore. It’s another person’s. The ache, due to this fact,
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 the 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’ve gotten an entire 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 girl’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 coloration dissolves. The water turns to nightfall.
Ache is needy.
What did I do at present? 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that we are going to go to dinner tomorrow with two outdated mates.
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 an entire bottle of cabernet.
Or slightly my mates
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.