No, not pushing bruises as in attempting to deal them for maximum profit on the streets. Rather, testing for pain. I am an inveterate bruise pusher, both literally -though it's been a while since I've bumped into an inanimate object with any kind of conviction- and in the looser sense of testing your emotional sore spots. I like to probe around to see just how agonizing things can get -on the assumption, I suppose, that if you do your worst to yourself, no one else can top it. Worse than pain, in my book, are fear and surprise.(This is possibly why clowns are on the ixnay list. Also roller coasters, slasher flicks, the younger of the Bush presidents, blind dates, kitchen timers, animals that pounce, turbulence, paintball, pirates, and those pagers they give you at Panera. Eeek!)
Still, even us dedicated probers of pain get distracted. We get caught up in the mechanics of life, the sheer logistical wherewithal required to weather things like cross-country moves, job changes, and the sudden introduction into one's life of cocktail hour on the porch. We forget to keep checking to see if we hurt, and when we remember, we don't.
It's startling, the cessation of pain. It's far more surprising than pain's introduction: you know life is going to hurt, and how, but it's hard to remember, in the thick of things, that your knee was once something other than the purple of the world's most beautiful sunset, that your heart was once its true color.
Look Ma, no bruise:
- I was never Clara
- High school
- Middle school
- Myself, 19
- You didn't care
- Preschool nemesis #1
No comments:
Post a Comment