Taproot

Atrophy

If you were to ask me what atrophy means on a good day, a happy day, I'd probably tell you it's kind of like aprize, one step up from amedal and a little bit bigger than aplaque.  I usually invest a lot of energy into smartassery on good days.

 

If you were to ask me on a normal day, a run of the mill day, I'd direct you to Merriam-Webster, where the definition of atrophy is as follows:

 

1: decrease in size or wasting away of a body part or tissue; also : arrested development or loss of a part or organ incidental to the normal development or life of an animal or plant

2: a wasting away or progressive decline

 

If you had asked me to define atrophy on my first day of physical therapy, I would've told you to leave me the hell alone.  If you'd persisted, I may have said atrophy is the process by which my left leg became a complete stranger to me from one day to another. 

Then I would've told you to piss off.

 

Sharon says I'm exaggerating.  She says she can't see the difference.

 

Look!  I say.  LOOK, DAMMIT!  There's no muscle there.  NONE!   

 

She shakes her head.  She thinks I'm over-reacting.  But I know.  These are my legs.  These legs made me untouchable in freeze tag.  Unstoppable in football.  They carried me and my teammates to victory countless times.  They were the key to the swagger that everyone said I walked with.  I know these legs.

 

Or at least I know the right one.  The left one looks like some skinny guy's leg.  The right one looks like it can deliver a crushing shot to the nuts of anyone who says I've lost a step.  The left can barely get through ten leg lifts without shaking and faltering.

 

They look the same to me, Sharon says.

 

Bullshit! I say, without wit or charm.  You're not really looking!

 

Yes, I am, she replies.

 

Bullshit! I say again.  Because it just feels like the right thing to say.

 

Why?  Because my leg has failed me!  Because after everything we've been through, it is quivering and shuddering while I do weak man exercises in a room full of old ladies riding exercise bikes and squeezing tennis balls, while some bald filipino therapist asks me, Is this too hard?

 

NO, DAMMIT!!! THIS IS NOT TOO HARD!!! YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT'S TOO HARD!!! I TELL YOU WHAT'S HARD!!!

 

I'm glad I scream that part in my head, because I'm not sure the old ladies can handle the truth the way my inner Jack Nicholson wants to spit it.  Even so, I'm embarrassed and humiliated by my loss of control...by how scary I find this.

 

I take a couple deep breaths and try to remember how, a couple days after my injury, my dad went on and on about how the quadriceps virtually disappears immediately after a knee injury.  He said it was "amazing".  You see, most atrophy is a gradual process, a wasting away due to disuse over a prolonged period of time.  But in the knee, atrophy is immediate.  Dramatic.  When the complicated machinery in the joint is damaged, the muscles around it sacrifice their size and strength so the knee can no longer be used.  So it has a chance to heal.  So it can take a break, for crying out loud.

 

My muscles are failing on purpose.  Because they know that, if they didn't, I would tear that knee apart.  Best to just suck it up, do the leg lifts, and try not to tell the old ladies I voted for Obama.  Healing happens at its own pace, if at all.  It will not be rushed. And, though I'm fighting the concept, I'm starting to remember that I've been down this road before. 

Splinted Dreams

I have been silent for over two months.  Perhaps it has been my annual leave of absence, my summer hiatus.  Perhaps...no, probably...I just ran out of things to say, or ways to say them that I found interesting.  Appealing.  Edifying.  Or maybe, I just couldn't handle the responsibility that came from the fact people were actually reading my words and finding value in them.

Regardless, it has been months since I had the urge to write, to put my thoughts to the test of words and present them for judgment.  I have started many a day with a commitment to break my literary fast, but ended them all with nothing to show but an increasing frustration with my inability.  My failure.  I know that somewhere, deep within my most honest self, I believed eventually the words would constantly collect until they spilled over the banks of my mind like a spring glutted river.  But I was wrong.  For the past weeks, life has continued...ended...happened all around me, and I have had nothing to say.  Just a constant hope that tomorrow I'll be better.  Different.

That's the truth of it, really.  I have lived in hope unrealized that I will wake up tomorrow and be more healthy.  More wise.  More whole.  And time has crept on at its petty pace and brought me no closer to my dreams, or the expectations I have always felt the burden of.

After a year of telling everyone who asked that I was "33,  same age as Jesus," this month I will lose even that tenuous connection to the Christ.  On the 21st, I will move into a year that confirms that, not only am I nothing like him, I am nothing like what I expected to be.

A couple months ago, I blew out my knee.  When told of my misfortune, people are quick to point out I am not as young as I used to be (as if we are ever as young as we used to be).  Though I am quick to point out that a shoulder to the side of a planted leg will ruin a twenty year old's knee as easily as a knee the same age as Jesus, it is a statement that never fails to hit me in a vulnerable spot.  When the doctor told me the extent of the damage, I walked out of his office, sat in my truck and wept.  Not because I fear pain--I handle pain better than anyone I know.  Not because I did not think I'd recover--I heal freakishly fast...ask my father.  No, I sat in my car and sobbed because I knew it was all catching up to me.  The years.  The hopes.  The dreams.  My body was buckling beneath the weight of who I should be, and I was no nearer the finish line than I was at 18.

Even I, who have made a practice of being vulnerably honest, have trouble writing about that.

My knee was surgically repaired on Tuesday, hopefully with the ACL of someone who sat behind a desk their entire life and never used it.  Though I spent the first two days in pain, dimly felt through a haze of Percoset, I am already up and about.  The doctor told me I couldn't damage what he'd done, so the only limit to my mobility would be how much pain I could take.  Because I take those things as a personal challenge, I have been forcing my knee to bend and flex, not wanting to wait for physical therapy before I start to push myself.  I tell myself that my goal is to be on a golf course soon enough to blow my Doctor Dad's mind.

But I no longer dream of changing the world.  I do not aspire to admiration and importance.  Those goals have faltered and fallen by the wayside of thirty three years.  Maybe that's the wiser me kicking in.  More likely, it's just reality kicking me.  Either way, there seems no point waiting for the better me to show up before I write.

I am what I am.  God said that.  Or was it Popeye?  I forget.  I think one of the best things I can do during the Jesus year of my life is to accept that.  And one of the worst things I can do is to stop writing about it.  I'm broken, but for those of you who still care to read...I'm back.