Here’s Zeke at 4:54 p.m. yesterday, minutes before he expired.
Words? None. Not today.
Zeke (December 26, 2007 – September 5, 2016).
RIP.
Related Posts: Zeke
Tag: Pain
Zeke: Fallin’ Forward.
Zeke, in his Countdown, stumbles forward.
We pinch the drip tube on the meds. He’s woozy coming down, he grasps for his footing.
The morning 5-milers, have been cut to half-milers, or less, this routine interrupted indefinitely.
A rash here, a rash there, in the most personal of his private parts, all swollen and inflamed from being scratched raw. (Is there no mercy?)
His left eye, now red and goopy, fails him badly in snatching nuts tossed from a few feet. His depth perception askew, his jaws pathetically snap at air. He can’t see them.
He limps, his back foot drags a broken toe, an affliction caught chasing a friend he could not catch. His muscles atrophied, his bones snap like twigs. (This is painful to watch.) Continue reading “Zeke: Fallin’ Forward.”
Muro 128
I’m freakish about putting anything near my eyes (and anything touching my Adam’s Apple like a turtle neck – I tug and tug and tug at it to Free Willy. Get it off! Get it off! Or the mouth guards dentists use to take impressions of my teeth and the chalky putty sliding down my throat, the eyes tearing, the gagging reflex, the choking, God, help me…Jesus that escalated quickly.)
It has become a necessary ritual to solve the eye-thing: Recurrent Corneal Erosion triggered by the back story here: I need to read.
The right hand grabs the 2.5 inch tube of Muro 128 5% Sodium Chloride Ophthalmic Ointment. I’ve made the switch from the cheaper generic. Raisin Bran maybe, but generics with eye lube? Saving a few bucks on chemicals you’re pouring into your eye balls, really? Are you nuts?
I think about why it’s Muro 128 and not 130 or 100 as I squeeze the salve in the lower lid. The hands tremble like an addict. I need this. I really need this. What I need is, to pay attention to the trembling hands inadvertently driving the aluminum tip of the tube through the eyeball into my brain.
One dab in each eye before bed time.
I pause, the chemicals coat the eye balls, the world goes blurry, I feel my way to bed. Continue reading “Muro 128”
A Slow Walk. Back.
Monday
Bliss.
All systems go.
Light gushes in and warms.
“The day was crisp and bright, the atmosphere quivering with life.”
Tuesday
Morning shower – a slow bend to soap.
A twinge in the lower left back.
A punch in the stomach. A kick in the…
Hands stretch to reach for the wall.
Cannot straighten. Will not straighten.
“Ash, bits of bone, a handful of sand”
Wednesday
Shifting and shifting and shifting on train seat.
I stand and let the up escalator work – can’t take the jarring from the stairs.
I ease up and down from curbs as I cross-town.
I shift my briefcase from left to right to left hand to transfer weight.
A slow walk, yet breathless. Sweat beads on my forehead.
A low throbbing migraine. Knee bone connected to…
Rain falls, a light mist, cooling.
“We are wooed, then mocked, plagued like Amfortas, King of the Grail Knights, by a wound refusing to heal.” Continue reading “A Slow Walk. Back.”
Morning Call
You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won’t let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls you through? Curiosity.
~ Abigail Thomas, What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir
It’s an all-night dance at The Alibi.
The strobes, the churning, my personal whitewater at the base of a long spillway of a hydroelectric dam.
I pull the left shoulder back and tug it hard to roll away from a throbbing right, and then settle heavily on the left. A desperate search for comfort.
A handless re-positioning of the knee pillow, a defensive moat shielding bone on bone impact, a life-to-date action now into the tens of thousands. And counting.
Voices drift into the dreamless oblivion. The unreal is more powerful than the real…Stone crumbles. Wood rots…But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.¹
A chill, a pulling up of the covers, and the play repeats.
Left shoulder pull
Right shoulder roll
Right knee tuck
Left knee slide
Voices
Covers
They can go on and on…
Notes:
- Image: Anna Vihastaya (Listening to Silence) via les-yeux-avides
- ¹ Quote by Chuck Palahniuk. Thank you Whiskey River.