kerouac says

there's this feeling you sometimes get--and i think it happens more to those of us who are embarrassed to admit we tend towards the self-pity--when you've torqued the bejaysus out of your knee, again, and you spend a couple months in an immobilizing brace. and this isn't the problem time, because you're doing what it takes to get better, and everyone gives up their bus seat to you because of your scary darth vader leg and makes space for you on the elevator and offers to help you pick up your pen because bending down is a pain.

then comes the time when you take the brace off, and your knee is this tiny atrophied sparrow knee, it looks like a sick drumstick, it kind of grosses you out and what's more, you've sort of forgotten how to bend it. you walk to work trying not to mind the jerks who push you from behind on the subway stairs because you don't climb fast enough, and you are tempted to notice every single sixteen year old who sprints by with their dumb perfect knees, who don't even know that they have them; their knees are round and dimpled and robust and they can turn on a dime and totter around on precarious shoes and they probably don't even want to go skiing or a to dance class or do child's pose, even though they can and you can't.

if you're lucky, you get to go to physical therapy and work on the knee. when you're home doing the exercises, it feels like your tiny chicken knee is permanently fucked, you're going to work and work and it still might never be the same, and you maybe think about those sixteen year olds and if you feel like wallowing you have a great excuse.



except i torqued my relationship--or, i didn't, no one "did" it, but it's gotten bent the wrong way somehow, and going to the dumb therapist today was like the very first time you try one of those impossible exercises and it isn't even just that you can't do them, it's that you can't do them but you will have to try every day, twice a day, to do them; you have six months of trying and failing, failing every morning, ahead of you just to get to where everyone else is naturally.

it's the same feeling i used to get in second grade when we got the full-page dittoes made of rows and columns of three-digit-number addition problems, big blocky pieces of math that made me want to go home, an entire page of them and i would sit at my desk and silently weep at the thought of so much frustration and failure ahead of me. i was a six year old who couldn't pick up a pencil.

i'm trying not to think of it this way. i know starting is a good thing. preferable, definitely, to not starting. there are also just pages and pages and mornings and mornings and lots of kleenexes ahead of us, and i feel like we are training for a very frightening marathon where masses of maimed people try to run and the bystanders all applaud like you guys are making so much progress! and it's so great that you're doing this! but secretly they think you are deformed and they're looking forward to going home with their non-maimed spouse to tango and slalom.

this is coming out sort of wrong; it's not that i think i have it so hard compared to mythical normal people; i'm just feeling daunted by the largeness of the task ahead.

a man in my writer's group lost his dad this year. his dad had brain cancer, and the first sign was his degenerating memory. his dad had to go to the occupational therapist a lot and do these memory exercises that were designed for children--young children--and he couldn't always do them. and my friend said that no matter how much he faltered, no matter how many elementary tasks aimed at ten year olds he couldn't accomplish at fifty-seven, he didn't spend much time being embarrassed, or feeling bitter about the huge amounts of work he had to put in just to make a show of keeping up. he just did it because it needed doing.

the therapist has a one-eyed cat named julie, and i think that's pretty awesome, so . . . leg lifts.

math.

and next time, waterproof mascara.