I have a half-dozen links/notes saved for blog posts from this past week. Which is likely a sign that those half-dozen things will not be posted. Because that is the way of blogs like these: you either strike when the rod is too hot for common sense to stop you or you do not strike at all
And because I have spent the last week in a lot of pain.
Pain comes in shades.
I post this with the caveat that I am not trying to one-up or out-suffer anyone. Trust me, as much as you can trust me, that I appreciate that pain is personal in the way that tastes in food or enjoyment of art is personal. There are recipes. There are genres. But right there, where the spark exists between the “I” which is you and me and each of us individually and the It, the object or concept in question, there is that personal relationship between your I and its It.
When you hurt long enough, people are apt to give you advice which is to say people are apt to tell you about their pain. Their suffering. Their shades. Their tastes. We are lonely. It is in our nature to talk. Bless us, one and all.
Sometimes, maybe most times, we mean well, but we are idiots. Because all we do is shout the name of our own personal pain over and over and over again. Into the void. Into the sky. Into the gray.
I am sorry that you hurt, Space Pilgrims, I truly am.
But this is my blog, so it is my time to shout. I am not speaking for you. I am not even speaking for myself, because the me in this much pain is probably not really me. Whether a half-truth or a desperate plea, I hold to that. I will continue to hold to that.
In 2022, when I fell while hiking and tore the ligaments | muscles | nerves in my leg so badly that I still do not walk like a real boy these four years later: that should have been the worst pain I ever experienced. It maybe was. I do not know. I told the people at the scene that it was a 6 or 7 on the out-of-10 scale, maybe an 8. A doctor later told me that it was a 10. Thing is, I do not recall that pain. I recall the fear. I recall the months of healing. I recall the falling down. I recall the long void that followed.
The pain I better remember is the pain much like the pain I have right now: the revolt of my body against itself as the genetic lottery awards me an autoimmune disfunction which fills my vessels and my veins and throat and my joints and my bones with inflammation.
The shades of this particular flavor of pains goes like this:
First, there is the idea of pain. A twinge. A whisper. A voice hiding behind a corner which is down the hall.
Then, there is the greeting. The laughter. The introduction. Hello, my name is…
Then, there is the romance. The dance. The twirling with pain down the path under the trees and up the hill. Waking up and having your pain there in the bed beside you. The pain strips naked and crawls into the shower with you. It shares meals with you. It stands with you and walks with you and it listens to you tell stories about itself.
Then, there comes the shade I fear the most. There comes the moment on the edge of a pit where you wonder for a second if you and the pain are just different names for the same thing.
This is the moment of exhaustion.
The reason the pain no longer crawls into the shower with you is because you no longer feel able to take a shower. You do not wake up beside pain because your dreams were pain. So much so for a moment upon waking you think you might be better, only to realize you are worse.
Where you press your hand against your back because making it hurt there means it hurts less elsewhere and you can breathe for a moment without wondering why you can you feel each and every breath. Where you watch TV or read books and every word and every scene is being told to you by the pain and it speaks with broken spiral teeth and a throat of bark and and bone and feathers.
Then, comes the shade I do not fear so much, though it is possibly worse. That point past the exhaustion. There are no words or quaint ideas about that point. Deconstruction. The silence that was never silent in the moment but is after because part of us is lost there on that shore. We forget the sound of the waves and later wonder from where did the salt and grit come. Memory lapses and a sense of loss.
Then, the lucky of us…we wake up one morning and we’re still exhausted but we can walk again. We can shower again. We can drop something on the floor and pick it back up again. Maybe not gracefully. Maybe not without sacrifice, but we can do it.
[this is where i am right now]
And each day, maybe each hour, after that is a step back up the hill. Learning to walk on our own again. Learning to breathe without having to press our hands into our back. Reading. Watching TV. Doing these things on our own, again.
Moving on to the final shade of pain, the ugliest shade of all, the one we don’t like to talk about with anyone but ourselves and often not even then
: the shade where we remember what it felt like and know it will one day return. Maybe worse. Maybe not.
and we laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh