Day 87

Maybe I shouldn’t have gone for a 3-mile walk yesterday afternoon, maybe I shouldn’t have gone against my superstitions and mentioned my stretches yesterday morning, maybe I shouldn’t have bent down in a certain way after my shower after my walk, but my back collapsed again yesterday, and I’m a crooked man again. And the stretches are painful and offer only slight relief. Maybe it’s all in the head, an accumulation of fear, fear of everything for everything and everyone. Wormholes take you to another dimension, the holes that fear digs just take you nowhere, away from any universe. What a way to start a week off. I think sometimes I should self-censor everything and just put up figurative poems and allusions and Aggie.

The mist is dripping from everything here this morning. There’s the possibility of snow later in the week. Damp squibs everywhere.

This fear narrative has been running through my life forever, from what I can make out. Even sitting here now, my main fear is not being able to et up again, or getting up and falling over, losing control of my limbs, losing my limbs, becoming even more incomplete than I feel myself already to be. Do I fear restarting therapy – is that why this has happened? If I had all the answers, I wouldn’t be afraid, would I? Or perhaps the answers would make me even more afraid. Perhaps this has happened so I have no chance of following this instinct to run away and strap an AK47 to my inexperienced (and now incapacitated) back and fight for a people I actually know very little about, except that it’s being decimated by calculated genocide.

I’m rambling now. Perhaps I always ramble. There is silence in the study; no music; just the clicking of the keyboard. The irony about working from home is that even when I’m on holiday, I sit in the same place, in the same posture, surrounded by the same things, trying to find words to put into some sort of order, to make sense of a life that may well have no sense to it other than its need to be lived. And I still haven’t looked at that poem I wrote on Saturday night. The scribbles fade, and the memory fades, the memory of somehow being whole. Being in pain and relatively immobile robs me of my sense of self, of my sense of achieving things, of having a voice. And it somehow makes me look at myself as pathetic because others have much heavier crosses to bear.

The week will get better. It has to.

Part of me is tempted to delete all this, to say, enough of these daily musings, enough of Aggie, but the bigger part of me says I can’t. Not now.

EDIT – I come back to this after having struggled through the below. I have done more stretches. They have taken away some of the fear and pain, and I’m almost vertical.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 44