Nerve endings

On daily life with chronic pain + some recent reads

Bottles of paracetamol, Vitamin D and B12 line the kitchen counter. Next to this, a neck brace seldom used, ibuprofen patches of different sizes and degrees of stickiness, varying tubes of anti-inflammatory ointments. In some ways, everything has slowed down. My days are broken down in pre and post nap segments. My weeks are punctuated by visits to doctors, healers and pharmacies. My hours hinge on Sudoku games of increasing difficulty, Brooklyn 99 reruns and as much new Netflix content as I can stand to watch without busting my cringe-o-meter. During afternoon lulls I sit on the couch, daydreaming, horizontal on the bed, daydreaming, gaze out the window, daydreaming.

I dream about mint green bikinis and yellow bucket hats. About wide-legged floral pants and beautifully draped blue saris. I dream about scores of queer and BIPOC Can Lit, about Patrice Pâtissier's maple syrup éclair, about sampling oat milk lattes at new cafés around Montréal. I dream about walking without inhibitions, long island iced teas and humid summer nights. I dream about meeting friends without the looming threat of being infected or infecting them. I daydream about writing for hours, inspiration abounding from all over, creating in spaces full of plants, with bookshelves overflowing with colorful spines and eclectic artifacts. I daydream of capturing feeling on film, of late nights at indie cinemas watching foreign arthouse I don't understand but enjoy nonetheless.

In many ways, everything is moving faster. I can't keep up with people's deafening rambles, running children at the mall, hurried pedestrians passing me by at great speed. Last August feels like yesterday and six months from now feels imminent. I notice greying streaks of hair, people in wheelchairs, people walking with canes. We move at the same pace. And the world moves on without waiting for us. Basic instincts are broken. My fight or flight response is out of order and activates without warning. Small joys are immense reprieve while small grievances tear through my world.

Books have kept me right in the head. In January, I cried my way through Fatima Farheen Mirza's A Place For Us, weeping as Amar's familial expectations hung heavy on my shoulders too. I wept for his father, Rafiq, finding it in his heart to forgive his son as he promised to wait for him in the afterlife should he not be granted access to the highest level of heaven. Weeks later, I swallowed Natasha Brown's Assembly and recoiled at the barefaced micro-aggressions depicted therein. Through the protagonist, I became privy to the sentiment of unbelonging and outofplacelessness that persists long after all the assimilation boxes have been checked. From the outside lurking in but rarely ever really in. Here’s Sabrina’s incisive look at the short novel. The colors are bleak and bright at the same time. The margins are sprawling with vitality.

“How can we engage, discuss, even think through a postcolonial lens, when there is no shared base of knowledge?”

Assembly - Natasha Brown

In February, my vitamins ran out and at my spouse’s behest, I supplemented my daily intake with texturally-challenged ashwagandha gummies. On many evenings, the sky is ablaze. My Facebook feed floods with photos of the sky dressed in deep shades of orange and red. Batsirai brought us the strongest gusts and the first Class 4 warning we'd seen in 15 years. A man died a few blocks from my house on his way to work because cyclone warnings were lifted hastily. Emnati came two weeks later, bringing our lives to a halt again.

As Art Spiegelman's Maus made the news for being banned by a school board in the US, I dusted off my old copies and gave them a long overdue reread. It still fascinates me - from a storytelling perspective - how the gruesome happenings of Auschwitz and Birkenau artfully contrast everyday interactions between a son and his aging father. Intergenerational trauma is delicate and complex. 30 years later, it’s as relevant a read as ever. Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were carried me through the third week of the month with long, luscious prose that sometimes stagnates but always pays off. The novel's themes supplemented ongoing musings on racial capitalism and climate action. I meditated on the ruthlessness of slow-to-move revolution; so much is owed to those who raised fists before us, standing to lose everything, so we could walk the earth a little less shackled.

In between paperbacks, I listened to my first audiobook of the year: Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti Racist Writing Workshop, which I found powerful and almost too radical to believe possible. At a macro level, thoughtful, fundamental change is imperative across disciplines. At a creative writing level, workshop leaders and attendees, if allowed to reinvent the wheel, could access parts of our collective experiences and psyches that established frameworks actively subdue. Rather than regurgitate age-old lectures on the rightness and wrongness of craft, the writing workshop can be community-building, a safe space to bear witness and widen the expanse of meaningful storytelling.

Whiteness isn’t antithetical to non-whiteness, it’s contingent on it. Creative writing is ethnic studies, is gender and sexual studies, is political science, is religion, is history, is sociology. The dichotomy is a sham. All art is political art. Everything less is denial, denial being the most political of all.

The Anti Racist Writing Workshop - Felicia Rose Chavez

*

A day-old teabag dries up on the side of my mug. All cyclone warnings were lifted and the pink hues of the afternoon sky mesh with birds breaking into song again. Bougainvillea is scattered across the driveway and the bedsheets are humid. My shrink urges me to be in the now. A pranic healer asked that I get into the habit of manifesting great things for myself. I focus on mom's prayers. I relax into chakra healing meditations.

Talking to my in-laws. Chocolate oat milk. Voice notes to friends across oceans. Selfies of people I haven't seen in years. Cousin after cousin after cousin having babies on babies. The lizards' rowdy sex hisses. Flaky paratha wraps. Staring at my bookshelf. Laughing at Arsh’s bit du jour. Listening to Sum 41 in the car. I have so many diagnoses and so many treatment plans. Many of the people I love have had and recovered from COVID-19. The world and my life are nothing I thought they’d look like and the bereavement is its own kind of pain. As I mourn the time that never was, I daydream, play Zwemo frantically and go as far as my legs will take me.