"Pithy"
All day, all night the body intervenes.
– Virginia Woolf
1. I shrug off my messenger onto the floor and forget to kiss you when I walk through the door.
Pith: the pain has its steel hoop around my lumbar.
2. I catch myself tottering–a deformation of my walk.
Pith: a family resemblance: the curvature progresses faster than any other before me. I am not yet thirty.
3. I take a tumble after I miss the curb.
Pith: had you not caught me by the arm, I would have finally broken my first bone.
4. I switch positions before I even alight.
Pith: I never thought pain would claim intimacy for its own.
5. I crack three different places. It annoys you. It worries you.
Pith: they said it would make my knuckles bigger, but it is one of my most futile of pleasures.
6. I submerge myself in an epsom bath.
Pith: smelling like eucalyptus and lavender is the closest to relief because you can fool at least one of your senses.
7. I lay against you as we watch the ship go into warp.
Pith: I laid this way while doing homework all through high school, and my case silently went from light to moderate.
8. I cannot form sentences. Non-sequitur, organic hesitancy.
Pith: I would never wish upon anyone a life in the thickness of fog. The shame of being lost in it.
9. I can’t make it up the stairs while cradling the box.
Pith: I hate admitting that I will have to depend on you more and more. That you will have to lie to me that it’s okay.
10. I am cold and distant.
Pith: pain is subterranean, a geography to which you will forever be foreign. To be present is to also be far away.
11. I will myself to take deeper breaths. You think something is wrong.
Pith: the shallowest part of me is my breath. Some days feel breathless in all the wrong ways.
12. I look perpetually exhausted.
Pith: pain redefines what labor means.
13. I look unhappy.
Pith: joy so often feels remote, but you are teaching me that it never left me.
14. I wish it were otherwise.
Pith: magical thinking can really be cruel optimism.
15. I choose not to operate.
Pith: why should a boy ever have to choose between a life in motion or recumbence?
by Travis Chi Wing Lau
