Will It Hurt? --- by Rey Don'tSay, the Saturday Dude
Boy, the blank page is quite an intimidating so-and-so. Usually, I have time to read the good works of my other 6 Consortium writing sisters and bros. This week, medical stuff and a laptop that decided not to cooperate--it was paralyzed, not booting, ha!--all prevented this newfound routine of mine. I apologize to them and any audience members because I feel I’m writing a little blindly here. I had to reinstall Windows 10 just to get it to work at all. Sigh. Hi there, kids. Hope life is tossing some joy beads at you.
I doubt I’ll be tossing you guys any of those joy baubles. I want to discuss pain. One of the least favorite subjects ever. It’s been with us always. We begin in pain, causing pain. We have and are pains during the time we’re around. At least sometimes. (I’d win a Nobel for that, the BEING a pain part--ain’t I a stinker?--just ask Cleo.) And typically, we end in pain, unless it’s quick, or we’re blessedly unaware, or we have a doctor with a blessedly generous prescription pad...to make us blessedly unaware.
Now that that door is WIDE open, I get to complain some. Complaining is a treasured art form among us diseased, disabled, older, and hell, sometimes younger (whiny brats) ones. ((Did you see how CONVENIENTLY I included myself in the “younger” us?? I’m sure NO ONE caught that, HA HA)). Oh, and don’t forget the Vets. They’d military boot me out of the club for not spotlighting their sorry behinds. Or at least complain loudly. Eh ehmm.
I was in considerable physical pain last weekend. I was spasming so freaking much. I wanna describe it, but I’m not sure I can do this awkward bed dance any justice. There're the smaller twitches that are on-going: squeezes and releases every few seconds, mostly in my back and right leg. That’s that newer jig that I’m afraid is a sign of worse tragedy to come. But those littler stuff trigger, alongside any simple touch, be they gentle, firm, or, let’s say, otherwise, it doesn’t matter, they all trigger these deep painful body-wracking muscle convulsions. From hell. Sometimes they stay in my legs, sometimes they crush my abdomen in a vise. Those are the Mack Daddies of the spasm world. For me, at least. One abs spasm-a-rama last week went on for about 20 minutes. One clench. No release. I think that’s my record at the moment.
Yes, I’m paralyzed from my upper chest down. No, I can’t feel on the surface. But there’re some pain nerves in the interior that can make me sing falsetto from time to time. La, la, la, AGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!! (insert vulgarity of your choosing. Trust me, I’ve used them all. Even in languages I don’t even know, like Esperanto, or American English!). The motor nerves and most of the feeling ones are kaput. Except for the pain.
I feel that "phantom limb" thing that amputees talk about some, but in most areas of my body below the paralysis line on my chest. Those parts of my body aren't gone! Heavens no. I get the sensations of an amputee without any of the removals of the parts. (I'm here....but I'm not....whooeeeooo!) My brain projects some kind of phantom body image that it thinks is real. It’s a great pastime when someone moves a foot or leg of mine without my knowledge and I get the shocking surprise of a limb not where my mind is reporting it is. Such fun!!
Another example: I think I feel a bed-shoe right now, a soft marshmallow-y contrivance especially on my left foot (the bottom of my right foot feels hot). The shoes can help keep the heels from sores, help the feet from a dropsy thing they do without support, and mine also help keep some small stability to restless (still paralyzed) feet that tend to move all over the county, left to their own nefarious devices. The color of the shoes is a bright sky-blue. My mind imagines the texture and binding of the shoe up my ankle. Yup, right this instance. But it’s only because I PUT the shoes on myself, my brain imagines a full fake news reality. T'aint real. Not at all at all. Why all this? Not really known, I guess. To reassure? Maybe the nervous system has a hard time with goodbyes? I bet you had no idea your body does the same darn thing. It’s automatic, and you can’t really turn it off. At least, I seem woefully unable to. I think this is why drunk people stagger a lot, though.
Ahh, well. There’s one little plus. I don’t fully feel how woefully obese I actually am until I touch myself (shudd-up) on my hairy Homer Simpson memorial homage torso. Yep. I merely close my eyes and I'm not a beach ball. I’m Brad Pitt. (I don't really have to the do the eye-shutting part, it's the same either way) Is that dated? Who do the younglings like these days? Sam Mendes? No, ain’t that a director? It’s Shawn! Shawn Mendes! See, young-uns. Imma one of youses. Smug grin. Does the tag-hasher hash by itself now? Anyone?
Other plusses: can’t feel needles down there (though, except for insulin pings in the stomach, they poke arms typically and I’ve had a million of those. The ones bad at poking can make it torture.). There are invasive procedures like when polite urology techs shove big tubes up? Down? Through? Through my urethra. They’re trained to warn folk of what's about to occur. I warn them back, it won’t hurt. Go to town. Can’t feel sticky medical tape, though, again, many of those white strips are on my arms where it hurts. When I do get some on my leg, it sometimes pulls the skin and leaves those red splotches. No probs.
That’s not to say my leg or stomach doesn’t feel such intrusive things on their own. Cause they surely do. (Those body areas feel like different entities. Unruly children?) Cue jerks and spasms. One of my favorites was when I went to the podiatrist the first time post-disabille. I was in a rolling throne and they put my right leg up in one of these free-swinging hammock-type contraptions to be worked on by the foot doc. Well, the tech happened to be a mountain of a man and he was tasked to hold the leg and foot still. They intended to poke with a syringe with quite a long needle carrying local anesthesia to numb the toe they were gonna fix, an in-grown one on my right big toe. As if I were like regular people. Quaint. They stabbed. My foot jumped. And that needle went all the way through my toe and out the bottom side!! By say a good couple of inches. We were all shocked watching that syringe waving around in the air peacefully piercing that fat big toe, on the life-less but jerking foot in that foot sling, waving to and fro like some drug-fuelled nightmare. Cool beans! We pin my foot on footstools now. It can be a battle. The rascal.
Gee, I ramble a lot. Hope it’s not annoying.
I still have that hole/wound on my butt. I’m telling people that I have 3 nipples (true, like an evil Bond villain), and now, counting the one in the middle, the one on the side, and the one that I am, I have 3 assholes. Symmetry. (That’s not funny, Mr. Rey...tsk, tsk, tsk) I’ll never be invited back to that Downton Abbey social again. Sigh.
Enough about my crap. It’s just depressing like always.
How bout some more?
My Mom knows pain. My Mom was a happy 3-year-old when she wandered too close to a pit in the yard cooking a pig in the ground. Her dress burned. My Mom burned. Very very badly. All her many other siblings were standing around stunned in shock, til my oldest aunt got ahold of a blanket and smothered the flames. The screams took a lot, lot longer to quell.
My brother wrote about it for school, I think, once. He got a lot of details out of Mom. More than we’d ever heard before. I don’t remember the percentage, as if that’s important, but anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of her skin got burned. Screaming went into crying.
Non-stop.
Agony.
Open sores all over. She had to stand on a stool. Naked. A makeshift sheet tent over her, but god, never touching skin. Back to screams. Back to crying. Non-stop. The tent was for keeping out the flies. It didn't work too well.
That’s the one detail I can’t shake. The flies. Landing. Crawling around on open sores.
The flies. 3-years old.
She wasn’t told, but the family was...that she’d die soon. She didn’t. She was told she’d never bear children. She bore 4.
You see. We're impossible. We’re miracles. Miracle babies. We shouldn’t be. We shouldn't exist. Out of the cauldron. Out of the ashes…
From pain.
All that was hard to write. Hard to tell. My face is leaking.
Imagine.
By the time we grew up, the scars were the same color as her regular skin. Not as noticeable. I never gave it a lot of thought, because she never seemed to dwell on it much. I did notice when strangers came to the door and she was in shorts or something, she’d scramble to become “presentable.” Sometimes, I believe she had insecurities about her appearance. She didn’t need to be. My Mom is beautiful, gorgeous. And when she’s “put together” it’s a wonder to behold. She married the “Prince Charming” from the high school, don’tcha know. (Yes, they had those. Quit sniggering!)
She was forced to quit school in 3rd grade to go to work. She didn’t finish her schooling. She was self-conscious about that. She needn’t have been. Mom has worked all her life and has great work smarts. Skills enough that in her last job she rose up to manage a very large group of workers who catered the events of a major airline’s training school and other professional events. She’s so smart. She’s so beautiful.
Imagine if Mom were given an education. Whoa, nellie.
She’s almost 70 now. The scars are still a problem because the skin becomes brittle and dry. She had lasers fix some of that.
I don’t know if I got some sense of shame from her. Something reticent about scars, embarrassment about a short education, discomfort with a disability. I know I struggle with all of those mightily. Did I inherit some of her hutzpah? Her courage? Her strength? Her will to survive? I don’t know. I’m still here. So is she. I don't feel brave. I feel like I've been broken by the torturer called Life, and never even been asked one question. Will I bear fruit? Bear children? Does telling you make you my children? Shivers.
She knows pain.
We...know pain. Generations of it. Is it a curse or a crucible? A forge? Born to suffer? Suffer to live? Bad luck? Coincidence? Who knows? I'm just as lost as you are. But there it is.
This may have come across as unbelievable. Very "no way" man. I assure you it isn't. It's my life. Our lives. We lurch through our lives sometimes. Just trying to get to the next day. Who brags about the pain? I hate it. I have it almost every minute now. Sigh. I need off my box. I hope this means something to somebody. Peace.
Speaking of pain, my partner, Cleopatra VII Thea Philopater (yup, that’s correct. Look it up, kids), has commanded me to make mention of our 4 healthy but crazy cats. There’s strong Titan, evil Kiki, sweet Chichi, and not-quite-with-it Vodka.
I was tasked to describe Chichi some. She likes me the most, maybe, of that assorted rock group. They’re all Cleo’s because whoever feeds them is the alpha to them...Or the ‘worthy’ one? Cats can be assholes, but they are treasures too. They don't like my chair with wheels or bed much, except when I'm not in it.
Anyways. While Titan does jump up onto my mechanical bed in the living room occasionally, to lay on a quilt at my feet sometimes, he mostly tries to entice me into letting him out the front door. A job I used to do 24/7. But now, I can’t get up all that easily. It’s a little sad. He’s our only indoor/outdoor. A sweet cat, but Titan can be demanding over that one issue. Peckerwood.
Now Chichi, is a small Tortie cat, as is the evil bitch Kiki, but Kiki is bigger. Chichi has a face like a chipmunk. She surprised us by getting pregnant as a small-sized teen. We were too late in figuring it out. She was adorable but ridiculously enormo those last carrying days. She had a litter of 6. 2 white, 2 black, and 2 bright orange. She had gotten out just one night only!! Cleo thinks she’s a party girl.
(He calls us his sluts, just because he’s jealous of our ‘sensual nature.’)
The kits have homes. Chichi’s fixed.
We have a routine. She knows when Cleo is fixing me dinner, and when I get my meal tray out that goes over my legs in bed. It's time. She jumps up beside me. Now are the moments of connection. She lets me adore her with my hands, as I coo and sing to her, sometimes.
Lately, though, I’ve had to do diabeetus and insulting (It’s hard to make insulin sound funny, insulingus?? Bet I get in trouble for that one.) things, so she’ll hop off when she sees me reaching for my red ‘beetus supply bag. It says Albertsons. But she’ll pop right back up when I’m done with those shenanigans, allowing more physical love (weird way to put that), but anxiously looking at the kitchen behind her back, for when Cleo triumphantly brings the vaunted food to my bedside.
Ok. This is the cat owner/weirdo part. Shut your eyes.
Cleo brings out the food, and Chichi begins her survey, looking for what she values deeply: chicken! Bock bock!
Daddy Cleo used to make extra stops on the way home from dialysis just for $1 chicken nuggets from BK. There was a time when she was an addict. I was given 2 or 3 nuggets, and then I would promptly peel back the offensive breading methodically, and piece-by-piece lovingly feed her the desired chicken. She loved it. One-and-a-half nugs were her usual limit.
Well, they’ve changed the way they make and sell nuggets and she’s lost her interest, but I do offer her a portion of whatever meat is on my plate. She likes beef ok. She can tear into a slice of turkey or ham lunch meat. Well, I do the precious tearing and try to make mounds because it’s hard to pick up flat meat off a flat surface when you have an adorable cat mouth.
She rejects a lot of profferings. Usually something in a sauce is bad. Or too flavorful. We don’t offer her any spicy stuff. We’re responsible (yeahhhhh, rightttttttt).
She loves chicken the most. Breast over dark meat. Don’t look at me that way.
We do put treats on my serving tray for her when we KNOW she won’t like the fare. She always leaves one or two of them behind, oddly. Sometimes Cleo distracts her off my bed by shaking a cat treat bag. Sometimes she’ll peruse Cleo’s dinner for goodies.
See. Rambling.
We try to give our kids the least painful lives possible. Doesn’t always work. We try.
Muah.
Rey Don'tSay
Bonus: This song, "This Life," by Vampire Weekend, has been haunting me for several weeks. Sad song to an upbeat sound. Makes me wanna wave my arms around as I think of pain, mistakes, etc. It blew me away to see my themes from above all through this song. Hell, I have the same beard as Wade. He's much prettier. There's a Mom ref. Pain refs. Broken dreams. Suffering. So let's dance. Wanna dance with me?
 |
| Painful Grin |
Now that that door is WIDE open, I get to complain some. Complaining is a treasured art form among us diseased, disabled, older, and hell, sometimes younger (whiny brats) ones. ((Did you see how CONVENIENTLY I included myself in the “younger” us?? I’m sure NO ONE caught that, HA HA)). Oh, and don’t forget the Vets. They’d military boot me out of the club for not spotlighting their sorry behinds. Or at least complain loudly. Eh ehmm.
I was in considerable physical pain last weekend. I was spasming so freaking much. I wanna describe it, but I’m not sure I can do this awkward bed dance any justice. There're the smaller twitches that are on-going: squeezes and releases every few seconds, mostly in my back and right leg. That’s that newer jig that I’m afraid is a sign of worse tragedy to come. But those littler stuff trigger, alongside any simple touch, be they gentle, firm, or, let’s say, otherwise, it doesn’t matter, they all trigger these deep painful body-wracking muscle convulsions. From hell. Sometimes they stay in my legs, sometimes they crush my abdomen in a vise. Those are the Mack Daddies of the spasm world. For me, at least. One abs spasm-a-rama last week went on for about 20 minutes. One clench. No release. I think that’s my record at the moment.
Yes, I’m paralyzed from my upper chest down. No, I can’t feel on the surface. But there’re some pain nerves in the interior that can make me sing falsetto from time to time. La, la, la, AGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!! (insert vulgarity of your choosing. Trust me, I’ve used them all. Even in languages I don’t even know, like Esperanto, or American English!). The motor nerves and most of the feeling ones are kaput. Except for the pain.
I feel that "phantom limb" thing that amputees talk about some, but in most areas of my body below the paralysis line on my chest. Those parts of my body aren't gone! Heavens no. I get the sensations of an amputee without any of the removals of the parts. (I'm here....but I'm not....whooeeeooo!) My brain projects some kind of phantom body image that it thinks is real. It’s a great pastime when someone moves a foot or leg of mine without my knowledge and I get the shocking surprise of a limb not where my mind is reporting it is. Such fun!!
Another example: I think I feel a bed-shoe right now, a soft marshmallow-y contrivance especially on my left foot (the bottom of my right foot feels hot). The shoes can help keep the heels from sores, help the feet from a dropsy thing they do without support, and mine also help keep some small stability to restless (still paralyzed) feet that tend to move all over the county, left to their own nefarious devices. The color of the shoes is a bright sky-blue. My mind imagines the texture and binding of the shoe up my ankle. Yup, right this instance. But it’s only because I PUT the shoes on myself, my brain imagines a full fake news reality. T'aint real. Not at all at all. Why all this? Not really known, I guess. To reassure? Maybe the nervous system has a hard time with goodbyes? I bet you had no idea your body does the same darn thing. It’s automatic, and you can’t really turn it off. At least, I seem woefully unable to. I think this is why drunk people stagger a lot, though.
 |
| Ain't me. I also don't have the helpful grey triangles on the side. I need them, though. |
Other plusses: can’t feel needles down there (though, except for insulin pings in the stomach, they poke arms typically and I’ve had a million of those. The ones bad at poking can make it torture.). There are invasive procedures like when polite urology techs shove big tubes up? Down? Through? Through my urethra. They’re trained to warn folk of what's about to occur. I warn them back, it won’t hurt. Go to town. Can’t feel sticky medical tape, though, again, many of those white strips are on my arms where it hurts. When I do get some on my leg, it sometimes pulls the skin and leaves those red splotches. No probs.
That’s not to say my leg or stomach doesn’t feel such intrusive things on their own. Cause they surely do. (Those body areas feel like different entities. Unruly children?) Cue jerks and spasms. One of my favorites was when I went to the podiatrist the first time post-disabille. I was in a rolling throne and they put my right leg up in one of these free-swinging hammock-type contraptions to be worked on by the foot doc. Well, the tech happened to be a mountain of a man and he was tasked to hold the leg and foot still. They intended to poke with a syringe with quite a long needle carrying local anesthesia to numb the toe they were gonna fix, an in-grown one on my right big toe. As if I were like regular people. Quaint. They stabbed. My foot jumped. And that needle went all the way through my toe and out the bottom side!! By say a good couple of inches. We were all shocked watching that syringe waving around in the air peacefully piercing that fat big toe, on the life-less but jerking foot in that foot sling, waving to and fro like some drug-fuelled nightmare. Cool beans! We pin my foot on footstools now. It can be a battle. The rascal.
Gee, I ramble a lot. Hope it’s not annoying.
I still have that hole/wound on my butt. I’m telling people that I have 3 nipples (true, like an evil Bond villain), and now, counting the one in the middle, the one on the side, and the one that I am, I have 3 assholes. Symmetry. (That’s not funny, Mr. Rey...tsk, tsk, tsk) I’ll never be invited back to that Downton Abbey social again. Sigh.
Enough about my crap. It’s just depressing like always.
How bout some more?
My Mom knows pain. My Mom was a happy 3-year-old when she wandered too close to a pit in the yard cooking a pig in the ground. Her dress burned. My Mom burned. Very very badly. All her many other siblings were standing around stunned in shock, til my oldest aunt got ahold of a blanket and smothered the flames. The screams took a lot, lot longer to quell.
My brother wrote about it for school, I think, once. He got a lot of details out of Mom. More than we’d ever heard before. I don’t remember the percentage, as if that’s important, but anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of her skin got burned. Screaming went into crying.
Non-stop.
Agony.
Open sores all over. She had to stand on a stool. Naked. A makeshift sheet tent over her, but god, never touching skin. Back to screams. Back to crying. Non-stop. The tent was for keeping out the flies. It didn't work too well.
That’s the one detail I can’t shake. The flies. Landing. Crawling around on open sores.
The flies. 3-years old.
She wasn’t told, but the family was...that she’d die soon. She didn’t. She was told she’d never bear children. She bore 4.
You see. We're impossible. We’re miracles. Miracle babies. We shouldn’t be. We shouldn't exist. Out of the cauldron. Out of the ashes…
From pain.
All that was hard to write. Hard to tell. My face is leaking.
Imagine.
By the time we grew up, the scars were the same color as her regular skin. Not as noticeable. I never gave it a lot of thought, because she never seemed to dwell on it much. I did notice when strangers came to the door and she was in shorts or something, she’d scramble to become “presentable.” Sometimes, I believe she had insecurities about her appearance. She didn’t need to be. My Mom is beautiful, gorgeous. And when she’s “put together” it’s a wonder to behold. She married the “Prince Charming” from the high school, don’tcha know. (Yes, they had those. Quit sniggering!)
She was forced to quit school in 3rd grade to go to work. She didn’t finish her schooling. She was self-conscious about that. She needn’t have been. Mom has worked all her life and has great work smarts. Skills enough that in her last job she rose up to manage a very large group of workers who catered the events of a major airline’s training school and other professional events. She’s so smart. She’s so beautiful.
Imagine if Mom were given an education. Whoa, nellie.
She’s almost 70 now. The scars are still a problem because the skin becomes brittle and dry. She had lasers fix some of that.
I don’t know if I got some sense of shame from her. Something reticent about scars, embarrassment about a short education, discomfort with a disability. I know I struggle with all of those mightily. Did I inherit some of her hutzpah? Her courage? Her strength? Her will to survive? I don’t know. I’m still here. So is she. I don't feel brave. I feel like I've been broken by the torturer called Life, and never even been asked one question. Will I bear fruit? Bear children? Does telling you make you my children? Shivers.
She knows pain.
We...know pain. Generations of it. Is it a curse or a crucible? A forge? Born to suffer? Suffer to live? Bad luck? Coincidence? Who knows? I'm just as lost as you are. But there it is.
This may have come across as unbelievable. Very "no way" man. I assure you it isn't. It's my life. Our lives. We lurch through our lives sometimes. Just trying to get to the next day. Who brags about the pain? I hate it. I have it almost every minute now. Sigh. I need off my box. I hope this means something to somebody. Peace.
Speaking of pain, my partner, Cleopatra VII Thea Philopater (yup, that’s correct. Look it up, kids), has commanded me to make mention of our 4 healthy but crazy cats. There’s strong Titan, evil Kiki, sweet Chichi, and not-quite-with-it Vodka.
I was tasked to describe Chichi some. She likes me the most, maybe, of that assorted rock group. They’re all Cleo’s because whoever feeds them is the alpha to them...Or the ‘worthy’ one? Cats can be assholes, but they are treasures too. They don't like my chair with wheels or bed much, except when I'm not in it.
Anyways. While Titan does jump up onto my mechanical bed in the living room occasionally, to lay on a quilt at my feet sometimes, he mostly tries to entice me into letting him out the front door. A job I used to do 24/7. But now, I can’t get up all that easily. It’s a little sad. He’s our only indoor/outdoor. A sweet cat, but Titan can be demanding over that one issue. Peckerwood.
Now Chichi, is a small Tortie cat, as is the evil bitch Kiki, but Kiki is bigger. Chichi has a face like a chipmunk. She surprised us by getting pregnant as a small-sized teen. We were too late in figuring it out. She was adorable but ridiculously enormo those last carrying days. She had a litter of 6. 2 white, 2 black, and 2 bright orange. She had gotten out just one night only!! Cleo thinks she’s a party girl.
(He calls us his sluts, just because he’s jealous of our ‘sensual nature.’)
The kits have homes. Chichi’s fixed.
 |
| Chichi Warrior--Mother--Goddess |
Lately, though, I’ve had to do diabeetus and insulting (It’s hard to make insulin sound funny, insulingus?? Bet I get in trouble for that one.) things, so she’ll hop off when she sees me reaching for my red ‘beetus supply bag. It says Albertsons. But she’ll pop right back up when I’m done with those shenanigans, allowing more physical love (weird way to put that), but anxiously looking at the kitchen behind her back, for when Cleo triumphantly brings the vaunted food to my bedside.
Ok. This is the cat owner/weirdo part. Shut your eyes.
Cleo brings out the food, and Chichi begins her survey, looking for what she values deeply: chicken! Bock bock!
Daddy Cleo used to make extra stops on the way home from dialysis just for $1 chicken nuggets from BK. There was a time when she was an addict. I was given 2 or 3 nuggets, and then I would promptly peel back the offensive breading methodically, and piece-by-piece lovingly feed her the desired chicken. She loved it. One-and-a-half nugs were her usual limit.
Well, they’ve changed the way they make and sell nuggets and she’s lost her interest, but I do offer her a portion of whatever meat is on my plate. She likes beef ok. She can tear into a slice of turkey or ham lunch meat. Well, I do the precious tearing and try to make mounds because it’s hard to pick up flat meat off a flat surface when you have an adorable cat mouth.
She rejects a lot of profferings. Usually something in a sauce is bad. Or too flavorful. We don’t offer her any spicy stuff. We’re responsible (yeahhhhh, rightttttttt).
She loves chicken the most. Breast over dark meat. Don’t look at me that way.
We do put treats on my serving tray for her when we KNOW she won’t like the fare. She always leaves one or two of them behind, oddly. Sometimes Cleo distracts her off my bed by shaking a cat treat bag. Sometimes she’ll peruse Cleo’s dinner for goodies.
See. Rambling.
We try to give our kids the least painful lives possible. Doesn’t always work. We try.
Muah.
Rey Don'tSay
Bonus: This song, "This Life," by Vampire Weekend, has been haunting me for several weeks. Sad song to an upbeat sound. Makes me wanna wave my arms around as I think of pain, mistakes, etc. It blew me away to see my themes from above all through this song. Hell, I have the same beard as Wade. He's much prettier. There's a Mom ref. Pain refs. Broken dreams. Suffering. So let's dance. Wanna dance with me?
My mind is blown by the sweetness of a man that can write about pain and suffering the way you do. <3
ReplyDeleteYou're very kind. Thank you.
DeleteAlso, thanks for that song. I put it in my favorites on youtube.
DeleteThat's too much for me to even pretend to meaningfully unpack even after two read-throughs. May you keep tapping the humor and strength to keep going, and somehow this all becomes a little easier to bear.
ReplyDeleteYeah. I struggle with getting a handle on it all too. I worry it's too bleak. Still, humor is the oar of my lifeboat, or some silliness like that.
DeleteYes I wanna dance with you
ReplyDelete