April 29

Waking up with my back out, that sharp nerve of taut pain creeping up my neck. I can’t bend my head forward. Usually it stays local to the geography of vertebrae, emanating in a quick web that quiets in inches, but today, it runs the length of me, head through neck through one side of the back before dissolving in my sits-bone. Opportune timing for one feeling already vaguely confined. Cabin fever closes in to couch fever, or bed fever, unable to so much as drive away.

The day entire between paragraphs, & little of account, my back in its apex, tight & clenched, radiating pain. Just now, though, I find myself cast beyond comfort, missing simple fun, or plain joy, or rhapsody, however brief. I’ve not laughed out loud in so long, not found mirrored gayety in another’s countenance, not felt heart sing but this one protracted dirge, monotone & ache. My feet itch now to carry me to a familiar place, to cast me from here, retract my solitude, trade it for even the quickest of bright smiles. This restlessness in me. I know joy a fugitive, but I know too this other, squatter-in-heart, how my pain halves & half falls transient & the other endures to malinger. There is no life without pain, but there ought not be life without joy either. Flint & tinder then. To spark a flame. Sit & hunch, sickle-back, or prospect some mirth.

& then thinking these the last days of my youth, or those already passed. How we grow. How our fingers clutch after a wake of ghosted artifact.

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