As I held the waist high fence,
looking out over the river valley, light
rain pecking at the dried leaves with a sound like a thousand insects,
all of their six-thousand little legs crawling, rustling on the dirt, just
underneath the sun-tanned skin of the leaves; looking down the
softly eroded slope now covered in chlorophyll green grass; over dirt
and rocks; over the San Joaquin River; over the water, water that
would rush with the coming of heavy rain but at the moment flowed
so slowly, had ripples shifting so slightly that its movement seemed
like an optical illusion; water divided by a strict linear geometry into
shades of grey, mapping the currents below, a division of light and
dark beginning in the armpit bend of the river; over oaks on the far
bank, wild branches spread close to the ground but with upward
growth subdued and slumped, as a man slumps in a room full of people
he sees as better than himself; up over the soft mesa forming the
other wall of the valley, a flat green plane, providing a flat green horizon
line from which the hard grey sky rose; a bird with the oddest
call, like the sound Mario makes when he eats a mushroom and grows
twice his size, calling across the rain filled sky; thin rain, looking like
long sheets of cellophane wrap hanging in the air; the cellophane rain
making me zip up my coat; smelling the clinging earth; my mouth
wet; I wondered why I felt defeated.
To have a hostile, spreading, clouding pain, in the head, the neck, the
chin, the knees, the fingers, the eyelids, the place half way around
the torso where so many villains in the movies stick the knife—right
behind the ribs—mixed with moments of achievement, intellect,
friendship, the pain fundamentally entangled with the moments of
life, a creeping sourness in a spoiled yogurt parfait that you’ve been
craving for weeks, so that you just keep eating it even though the sourness
attacking your tongue is screaming, “Stop! This yogurt’s gone
bad;” tonight there will be sweat on your back, burning in your throat,
spasms in your stomach as you vomit up the guilty bacteria, and many
times the sourness is just too much, you just stop eating but still, even
with just a small taste, you know tonight the vomiting will shred your
throat. I think I can describe chronic pain best this way.
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