Invalid

In that last decade of slow decomposition, every morning, Seth would map his pain.  

This meditation was hypnosis.  Laying in his bed, he watched the white blades of a dusty fan from some once pretentious decade.  There was a rhythm of bored aggression as they chopped the stale, humid air.  The cob webs would circle like buzzards.  The desert sky was white, three globes to mistake for suns, as he took inventory of this rocky geography of discomfort and worry.  His body felt both hollow and heavy.  He felt its outline on the warm cotton.  Like leftovers from a crime scene, he stayed still.  His eyes were counting revolutions.  

The fat cat pinned his legs between the tuck and the fold.  No matter; they were all but immobile anyway.  The cold of the isolation of summer was under everything, the unquenchable thirst for lemonade or vinegar.   The sounds of traffic and the distracting laughter of children from the day care next door all had their repercussions.  

A dull, throbbing--of loss, of expectation--was responsible for his insomnia.

He had, in his youth, studied accupuncture.  The practice, in the end, taught him mostly about guilt, the guilt of not being able to heal himself, and of still feeling pain.  Invalid, watching the fan's gyration yet feeling not so much as a breeze, he recalled the charts that had hung in the office.  Man, woman, front and back, the contours of both mortality and energy were marked with a magical grid  of pinpricks and hope.  

Sketching these figures in his memory, measuring the spaces between nerves, he mapped the burning pain, the stabbing pain, the throbbing and the mild discomfort.  In so doing he reshaped the constellations of his own being.  Like the Milky Way rolling off the edge of the Earth or into the ocean, he was leaving the living.  He was going into a hidden sky.  The shape of him--made of stars or made of pain--was but a vague outline, like all things, on which to hang the idea of him, on which to suspend our beliefs.