Sciatica

I am currently incapacitated and hobbled by pain. That pain erases my hopes and plans for the day, and instead, the proximity and reminder of the ephemeral vulnerablity of this body sit down next to me again. Mortality sits close and takes up the entire frame of my awareness. 

I feel the scarcity of time left to me and load the awareness into every step I take. The onslaught of fact and memory whispers at the edges of my struggles to attach ice packs and heating pads. I meet my desires that are braided into the failures of talent and circumstance and hold my hands up to the hot fires of grief. I approach but don't immerse myself in the emotions. 

I track the timeline of my life in a random collage of images. The memories rise out the mysteries of shadow. I wander the streets of Merida, Yucatan, wake up under a bridge on a hitch-hiking journey through Texas, see the beloved ghosts of women I have loved, now dead. I too am approaching the end, but it not a big deal. In fact it is routine, a passing of another unrealized human. 

Here, in the dark, on the edges of pain, I try to reconcile with the unrequited business of my life. It's a secret and solitary business, one that no one will read or know.

I didn't think it would go this way. My spring was supposed to be pain-free, a trip to New Mexico, where I would fill the fountain, feed the birds, explore the forests on my bicycle, nail down some licks on the guitar, and maybe paint some of my dreams. 

Instead I sit here crippled with a cocktail of meds -- Meloxicam, steroids, Gabafentin, Banofen, Tramadol -- that are not up to holding the line on pain. I am forced to sit and ruminate on the random wanderings of my mind. Memories assail me. I am thrown into the gauntlet on my end-of-life urgency to come to terms with the path my life has taken.

The unborn curriculum glows with a heat I cannot survive, but I warm myself in the proximity I can handle. It won't let me rest.

The pain rises and falls. I walk when I can, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the porch. I sit when I cannot walk. No position is comfortable. For short periods, when the meds meet the pain, I sleep. My dreams are a fever of mystery and shadow -- climbing mountains, driving through rivers, chasing ships on the ocean, lusting after the relief, the melting that is sexual union. 

It is not what I thought my days would be. It is what it is, and I am learning to lean into the pain. 

I wait for relief. I surrender into the pain, and this moment is the sum of my reality. I watch the screen of mu mind but live the hot and glowing wire of pain. All that matters is that I curl into a chasm of what comfort I can find. There is no escape.