I am crippled. Broken. I have various bits of my body that don’t work well anymore. Some of them are my doing, living the life I did. Some of them are an accident of birth, genetics, fate. Neither of those differences ultimately matter though. What matters is pain.

Getting out of bed is pain. Getting into bed is nice, but still pain. Making the morning’s first hot drink, for me or Wifeage, is pain. Needing to sit on the toilet for an extended time is annoying for its base reasons, but it’s also pain. Doing nearly everything always involves a level of pain. And I am sick of it.

Except writing. Writing isn’t really painful. Not usually anyway. A new malady in my left arm has hampered things, but I’m learning to work with it. But if it meant giving up writing for the barest hope that this new pain would lessen, I would not. Fuck that. I’ll fight through the pain, and I’ll let the tears fall later when I am confronted that this, my last vestige of pain-free sanity, is now tainted with the same niggling electrical pulses that fuck with every other aspect of my day.

I’ve done The Right Things. I’ve seen the GPs enough that they’ve sent me to others who purport to want to help me. One of them plans to cut me open, fix or fuse or replace the bits that no longer work, and I remain hopeful this holds an answer to all this pain.

For now though, I have only the pain, and the hope. There are no answers yet. Writing is my only answer, and I plan to cling to it forever.