I generally think I have a high tolerance for pain. Kick me, and while I most certainly will grimace, I won’t cry, and then I’ll kick you back. You could pull my hair, but as it used to be my sister’s favorite pastime, I’m fairly accustomed to that type of unpleasant snugness around the cranial area.
My sophomore year in high school I spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon in the Newport emergency room, sitting on a table with legs outstretched and both feet utterly numb, while a doctor carefully removed over thirty slivers embedded in the bottoms of both of my feet. Before I slipped on the dock and invited a plank of wood into my heel, I hadn’t a clue I had any other slivers.
A few years back I thought a bursting ovarian cyst was just severe indigestion from dinner the previous night.
When I was seventeen, I sliced my left middle finger open with scissors and received nine stitches. The next day I proceeded to place a large percent of my body weight onto this same finger, both of my hands mashed strategically up against the brittle red of the track, as I started in blocks for two races, and took a baton in my left hand for two others.
The point of my seemingly shameless horn-tooting? I’m tough, but as I realized today, only to a point.
Headache pain completely debilitates me, and while I do not understand why this is, I do fully understand that it remains fact. Every ounce of strength oozes quickly from my limbs when the evil banshee residing in my head begins his stentorian war cry. What typically starts as an irritating whisper rapidly escalates to a deafening shriek within a few short hours. And while I used to pride myself on my ability to effectively ignore the havoc-wreaking, attention-seeking banshee, as of late I find him far more adept in his powers of disruption.
Or maybe, deep down, I’m just a big wimp.
Could be.
Either way, after days like today, I can’t help but think I would willingly donate exorbitant amounts of time, energy and wads of cash (if at some point I possess said wads of cash) to help aid in the research responsible for permanently banishing my irksome little banshee.
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...