To have the world suddenly begin spinning is an event that one can take in stride for all of five minutes. You remain lucid, and joyous and entirely about your wits in that time. Conversation is brief, as all parties who witness your midday stumble gain anxiety on your behalf. Aid is quick to come that way. Neither of these prove to be luxuries compared to the usual fever stupor that accompanies vertigo and numbs it.
To have all of this happen in UL Lafayette’s very own monument to excess, Mount Griffin itself, should be considered its own punishment in Tartarus. This sudden and mysterious strike of vertigo but one tale in the continued tapestry of life. But one in a long string of betrayals which composes the experience of acute awareness of one’s own vessel. The continuous horror of being a sack of vulnerable flesh, but one of nearing eight billion; almost all removed from the context we were designed for.
Getting sick in Griffin delayed this article, ironic as that is, the failure of my body delayed speaking on the failure of my body. Perhaps it had a vendetta for one reason or another, but in this war that will go on till either organ failure or accident, my mind wins out once more. Wrong-headed as it is philosophically, I can’t help but couch my feelings on physicality in such a dualistic language.
I am not as invulnerable as I would like to be and thus do not like to accept otherwise. I’m not quite a brain piloting a body, the relationship between the two is more complex than the relationship I have with a car, but oftentimes the two can feel comparable in handling. My rig overheats, it needs benchmark tests I never give it and I’ve been slacking on routine maintenance for years now.
Still, I don’t hold grudges against the body for such things, I’m not a fan of it, but it’s stuff I can take care of if only I could make a class schedule to fit it all in. Drink some water, really stay aware of my limits, hop on a bike and precariously balance on the worst sidewalk ever near the freeway, good old American fun. As disdainful as I am of those activities at times, it’s never the process’s fault, but the clock’s.
No, my true and continuous gripe with the body and its anguish is that of pain. A deeply useful sensation I’ve had a skewed relationship for a long time. Perhaps it started when I was still in pre-school and witnessed one of the older kids I was in daycare with have an allergic reaction to a hornet. I know whatever empathy I possess told me that smarted, but I have another moment I look back on more often.
The adrenaline of breaking my leg lasted far longer than it should have from the testimony of many a party. Broken around midday in my first and last game of recess football, and lasting until well into sundown; the actual separation of the two halves of my fibula and tibia weren’t nearly as bad as the restless night which proceeded it.
With only Ibuprofen, and two attentive parents to hear my wails, eventually my consciousness faded after a long day and I could pass out in the darkness.
My right leg would continue to haunt me beyond that fateful year, an experience that would only sharpen my feelings on pain.
The fear of losing the ability to walk for just a few months longer set me up for a later failure in the form of a chilly winter’s morning. I spent years walking the small parking lot of my middle and high school, but my first was certainly the most eventful, partially because during one of the first laps of winter I felt the sharpness of cold steel against nerve.
It was debilitating, but still, my PE teacher would have me hobble along behind my classmates that day. He was far too uppity for his or anyone’s good, but that’s neither here nor there, now. What matters is the way that my current ideology congealed under such pressures. Fortunate enough to avoid being denied my necessary healthcare, I questioned what purpose pain served in my life.
Now I think of pain as the sticky keys of the human experience more often than not. Annoying, and something I’d like to find an off switch for. Though maybe not as permanently as sticky keys.