Spineless spine

I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I’ve pinched something in my spine, and now I can’t sleep. I’m lying here at seven in the morning after a night shift, and my spine burns and pulses. It wants out. I rolled to the other side, and it picked up the pace. Now it pulses, burns, and cracks. It doesn’t like me. It doesn’t want to be with me. It wants to leave.

Yet I was never spineless. I always held it upright, straight. Proudly and honestly, waiting for someone to reward me for it. “That George is so good,” “that George is so clever,” “that George is so kind.” That George has a spine that doesn’t want to stay with him. That George was so good he ended up hating himself. All he has is poverty, pain, and alcoholism.

You brought it on yourself, George, and you have only yourself to blame, don’t you?

You’re lying here in bed with a broken frame while dust settles on the wooden floor in thick layers. The shadows dance on the ceiling, cast by the light of candles, and that crucifix is laughing at you. No, it’s not a smile; he laughs out loud at this “life” of yours. You’re lying here, and even after an eight-hour night shift, sleep wants nothing to do with you. Your spine can’t stand you, and sleep avoids you. You’d cry, but you are too tired for that. You’d scream, but you’re not spineless enough to disturb the neighbors.

Void, silence, and me. Alone. I wished to have what I have now, this undisturbed fortress of solitude, this peace. No, not a global, noble peace, just peace of mind. As I rolled onto my back, the burning gave way to tingling in my toes. An old, familiar one. So familiar that I stopped dealing with it a long time ago, because I am too… something. Too lazy, too useless, or too resigned. Just too done.

Me, myself, and pain. Nothing else exists here in this moldy flat, and I don’t even want it to. Lying here while my nerves perform a new theatrical show. Their payback for how I played them all those years. Fair enough.

The morning light slowly tries to greet me through the drawn blinds, smiling down at me while all I want is to fall asleep. The world is summoning itself toward another day, yet for me, the last one refuses to end. Night is day and day is night. I chose it myself. Chose this solitude. My own sketch, and now I don’t know how to get out. The tingling crawled slowly up to my thighs. I rolled onto my stomach and just waited.

Outside, a bin fell onto the cold, black asphalt, and the garbage man cursed this sun-soaked morning. Yeah, to hell with it. His day is beginning, and mine refuses to quit. My eyes stubbornly stay wide open; his desperately try to stay open. We both want this day to end so we can move on to the next one, the one in which we don’t want to be either.

It’s been a few minutes since I turned off the monitors and moved into the covers, accompanied by this familiar pain. Tomorrow I’ll limp back in front of that empty black square to do something I don’t want to do. My back won’t thank me, and neither will anyone else.

Why do I do it? I don’t know. Why do you do it? Because you don’t know. You don’t know where else to go, you don’t know what you want, and you don’t know how to stop. You’re here alone, and you have to get yourself out of it alone. You have seven hours left now before the screaming sound of the modern electronic rooster chains you back to your place, and you’ll obediently tread water. You won’t want to, but you will. You will, because those paper chains hold you there, and across your back, the whips of everyone else’s demands lash at you. The demands that everyone around you has placed on life.

This and that and the other, and how come you don’t have this and that and the other? And do you know that you want this and the other and that? Do you? Why? Too little? Too much? Too soon, too late? Hurry, wait.

I don’t know what to do, but I know I don’t want this, and yet I do it anyway. I’m here, and I’m suffering. The resonating alarm of my new masters, screaming through little black boxes, reminds me where I am and where my place is. With every new crowing, a paralyzing tremor spreads through my body. I neither protest nor agree. I stay silent, the way those before me stayed silent. Nobody spoke up, and nobody wanted it, but everyone lived through it. Everyone survived it. Perhaps we were all just surviving.

Scarred backs, clogged lungs, frayed nerves, and an ungrateful spine. Worn-out bodies and plundered souls. Step by step, time scarred us without mercy, and we kept pace and kept our tongues behind our teeth. Paper chains are stronger than the ones that clinked against wooden slats soaked in saltwater.

How can a person escape chains they cannot even see? My spine wants to leave me because I don’t have the courage or the strength for that escape; perhaps at least it does. I turn back onto my right side; the pain turns with me.

Outside, the garbage man let the bin lid drop from a height back into its place. Through the bars of the blinds toward the sunlight, I watch him. He doesn’t see me. Nobody sees me.

We’re all in this together, and together in it we’ll stay.

I turn onto my left side. Nothing changed; my spine still can’t stand me. The sound of the screaming garbage truck slowly fades into the distance. Life drives mercilessly forward, and all that remains is to open another bottle by candlelight.