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.
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...
This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.
Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...
They say water changes stone, carving it over time to angles and dimensions in harmony with water’s need to reach the sea; but sometimes, stones change the watercourse instead.
-The lovely and eclectic Shari
I’m collecting my favorite corners, like the one with the stunning oak tree on display for an entire neighborhood to see, its limbs shading a bustling crosswalk shooting confidence into pedestrians like electric currents of white light, fresh graffiti on a nearby curb: an infinity symbol, black and simple.
I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.
I’m collecting the surprisingly → Read more...