i’ll leave this open for now

Back Pain. A cliche that also is tuff to swallow. Commonly joked at, yet commonly experienced. I am with a slippery broken vertebrae, and when it’s tender, I can’t do anything about it. But wait.

Stuck in a limbo. The beach-party game kind, not the fancy kind.

…

And despite my relative youth (compared to a tortoise anyways), I have felt this immobility since I was diagnosed in 8th grade. Active enough to be considered fully healthy, occasionally grounded enough to feel kinship with our elders.

But enough about complaining, or at least, that’s how I feel when I talk about this. It’s like a shameful disease, an infirmity that won’t leave me. A secret that limits me.

I wish…no, I don’t wish anymore.

My back holds the experience of my life in it. Like a diary that was made physical through painful snaps at random Targets shopping for plain t-shirts.

And I just don’t want to think about it anymore. But times like these, the past four days, I feel incapable.

This is what I’m feeling right now. As I write this today. When was the last time you were told by the author of the words you were reading that they are in pain, right now?

Not debilitating, or world ending, or even that special (many other people suffer from the same deal).

Just…sad, pain

I took that picture of a bench, because it comforted me.

Something about seeing something that belongs, and also doesn’t. Gave me a soothing relief that I am not doing this alone. And I’m not existing in the negative space of uncertainty without company.

that negative space of uncertainty

That’s the kind of skills I want to build, a capability to dwell inside a fluctuating refusal of definitiveness. Not quite indecision, but a decisive decision to remain humble to the experience that is yet to come. So that I don’t feel obligated to live up to a superficial expectation that ultimately will end up being fraught with imperfection and a loss of interest.

That’s why all those “self-help” books end up collecting dust while the problems we sought them out for still lurk under the surface.

Like a gator.

ha

that’s the level of truth I have for the moment. More will be nonsense, less will be in-genuine. So this flower will speak for us both, she was beautiful, and so am I, supposedly.