Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Like it means something

I write my pain because it's the only thing that keeps coming back to me. I have a set of ankle and knee braces from when I played high school football; they're the last physical traces of those days. The rest of it stays in my legs. That's when she comes to remind me we're all alone together; my glittering angel of pain stays with me while the rest of you distance yourselves. If I tell the doctors about my angel, all they do is send me to more therapy and expand the horizons of my medicated life.

No matter how I try to find a way to escape her embrace, she returns in Red, Blue, Brown, and Green: the colors of my solitude. When I won my game of russian roulette, she was there. She stayed with me through car crashes and another attempt on my own life: I could tell I wasn't dead because her smile greeted me on the other side of a long sleep. I don't understand her motives. Whenever I try to explain her, or share her to make her weight lighter on me, she smiles and grows, crushing me like the mass of my older brother sitting on my chest.

She is with me in my slumber; she shares my bed out of pity because no one else will. Be they lightning pains from ankle to knee, or a slow, warm, aching smile arching through my contorted body, the ways to find her are never far away. She tries to help my madness, my knuckles bear their witness, but she only ends up ferrying me from moment to moment like the rest of you, but she never leaves. I hold on to her because she's loyal; she's not your pain, now is she?

I crawl, struggle, thirst, and bruise for a better way to live, but she seems to be, if not the light at the end of a tunnel, my only lantern in the recesses of my memories. Concealing my angel, I hold out a cold, weary hand, and beckon for help or love like it means something.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thomas's writing is some of the most not only inspirational but knowledegable writing I have ever heard. If someone thinks they know life...they have no clue until they have met this great man and great friend

-Nikki