My shoulder hurts. I am still and will be in pain for awhile. My doctor says I won't be happy for three months. I don't want to break the news to him about me and happiness. He's such a nice person. It (the pain, what else?) seems to go like this: I have a couple of days off, then therapy, then its on again. And during the couple of days off, I think, "Ah, its over." And it is in that moment, or those moments, that I set up my downfall. My need for certainty in an uncertain body. When the pain returns, which it always does, I am devastated. Capital D. This is a D day. I understand it will improve, has improved, is improving, but I can't see it from where I am at this moment.
There is so much on my mind. Family crap, the declining razor clam population,low salmon runs, laundry, the absence of big trees, writing and not writing. I open Microsoft word and it is like a dead thing compared to this, this living breathing blog. So, I close it again, no words to prove I had ever been there. I re-read my poetry. I review my fiction, detached, dispassionate. I hold a yellow notebook in the palm of my hand, grasp the pen--the perfect black, microfine roller pen, and like a unpenitent hobo, my thoughts are off again. I write nothing. I can't gather the words like I used to, in rough baskets and manilla envelopes, sorted by topic: romance and madness, fragments of captured memory, the eventual quilt of my life. My thoughts are mercury these days, they are liquid and wind and all of the things that won't hold still -- that can't be contained, that do not form words--
That won't behave.
It is as though I have never written.
The things I know to be true are so few: I love my husband. I miss my son. My friends and family are generous and forgiving. Life is better when I am conscious. I am better when I write.
I probably need a job, but Gwen says I need to let my arm heal. I'm not big on healing. So, I'm not working. And I am okay. I looked at my bicycle today. It is so beautiful. Sleek. And I want to vomit and take laxatives until I am. The monster is awake, I fed it cookies. It won't shut up.
Bob Dylan said it best: Been down so long it looks like up to me.
I'm being hystrionic. Don't worry. I know.
2 comments:
was that your left or right arm that was surgered? we might make matching bookends now!
writingness comes and goes. dont worry. you cant worry, it is not zen and makes things worse.
Don't forget the coral reefs dying en masse in the Caribbean. God, that weighs on my mind. If you will worry about them too, at least I will have company.
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