It’s like getting misplaced
abroad. You don’t communicate the language.
You cease
to ask instructions. Individuals say lumbar radiculopathy. Side
hypertrophy
Broad-based disc protrusion. Neglect your vacation spot.
The trick just isn’t
to really feel self-pity. The way in which I do it’s to say my physique
just isn’t 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 bushes emerge
like the pictures
on photographic paper within the cease bathtub
of a darkroom.
You will have 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 this time? Talked to it as to a lover.
“How does
that really feel? Is it higher if you lie in your facet
and put a pillow
between your legs? Curl knees as much as your chest?”
I inform my physique
that we’ll go to dinner tomorrow with two previous buddies.
It is going to be
a Roman dinner. We’ll reenact Pompeii, put on togas,
recline in type
on cushioned couches known as lecti—not painful, straight-backed
chairs—within the triclinium,
or formal eating room. We’ll drink an entire bottle of cabernet.
Or quite my buddies
will drink the wine for me, since I can’t combine alcohol with
the medicine I’m on.
They’re good medicine. We’ll have some enjoyable earlier than Vesuvius blows.