Today was a singularly unique day and probably the most interesting day of my entire life, as far as brand new experiences go. It began pretty much the same way as any other day. Wake up sleep deprived and a couple of hours away from work with lots of cussing, then unpause last nights aloneliness distraction (Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino and Chris O'Donnel, 1992), then light a cigarette, walk to Kroger, the bank, blah blah blah, etc etc etc. I was happy to discover that I'd begun singing to myself almost exactly after I'd finished with the cussing, which was a good sign that my brain probably wasn't going to spend the day trying to choke the joy and hope out of me with its fresh, malignant tendrils of coiled and blackened hatred. So, yeah, today began on a promising note. I was only seven minutes late to work, and I felt like I was on a pretty good roll until 3:30 rolled around and then this started to happen:
The usual walnut sized knot of dull pain in the lower left portion of my back came awake,
yawned, stretched, and immediately began to twist and tighten into itself while at the same time growing its borders up to regulation baseball size, as if it were attempting to squeeze that part of my back into an infinitely dense singularity of pain. This process took place over the course of about thirty minutes, so by 4:00 a dark gray lump of unrelenting agony, about the size of a grapefruit, was nestled snugly, deep inside the natural bowl-shaped declivity of my pelvis and taking up so much new real estate that it actually felt closer to my guts than my back. What it was doing in there was pushing forward against the wall of my abdomen while twisting in all directions at once, especially inward, as if it were striving for a critical pain threshold which, if crossed, would cause the entirety of me to implode into that grapefruit-shaped region of my lower left abdomen, leaving a 155 pound bloody gobbet, approximately seven inches in diameter, twitching and pulsing behind register 1 in a rude and grotesque manner until it finally collapsed into an extremely dense oblate spheroid of bone, meat, blood, guts and brains, all pulped together into something with about the same consistency of vulcanized rubber.
By 4:30 the pain had become magnificent in its intensity. That's really the only word that comes close to describing those brand new heights of never before experienced agony - magnificent. Its quality was pure, its purpose unwavering, and its delivery was just... relentless, unbroken, and absolutely without mercy. It was an onslaught of mortal agony that just kept going and going and going and going and GOING. I couldn't even think because the experience of it completely devoured my attention, blurring my vision, and holding me in a kind of hellish thrall. For almost two hours I gripped the edge of the counter before me with white knuckles and shook uncontrollably, sweating like a lunatic, with absolutely every muscle in my body clenched up to maximum tension. I was lucky that during the entire happening of it business was extremely slow, and I only had to think above that unending wave of agony a mere handful of times, because doing that was simply... exhausting.
At about 5:45 it started to diminish, and by 6:00 it had become blissfully tolerable again. Still there, of course... but what a blessed relief it was, to experience regular old familiar pain. Good old just pain... never leave me again, please.
