"sundowning in the club"

at a tender age, i fell off the monkey bars and hurt myself. i was barely able to walk, so my mother took me to the chiropractor, who manipulated my fractured spine without an x-ray. "young and healthy, you'll bounce back," he said. he sent me home.

at a later tender age, i asked a doctor, in doubt of what he said to me ("you will need new knees by the time you're thirty"): how much worse could it be?

a strange and ambiguous question to pose when faced with the reality of a rapidly developing disability.

call it ignorance,

call it immaturity,

or naivety. call it what you will, but

this is what happens when a prefrontal cortex is not fully formed, even when pain is your baseline:

you believe in the invincibility of youth.

you believe there's nothing that can take your strength,

take your vigor,

take your vitality.

doesn't matter that there was a doctor standing there telling me the antithesis of these very things, i still believed them, too.

so i ran, i jumped, i danced as hard as i could.

i impacted my knees as if they didn't ground me,

i bent my back as if it had never broken,

i used my body like full recovery was only a good night's sleep away.

but recovery was always days, weeks, months from me.

sometimes it never came.

and my body slowed.

what once was called a "swagger," lost its charming and confident qualities. fractured bones, once just stuck, now grind themselves down against fractured bone and give way, and

now i grunt and groan with effort, discomfort, and inflexibility.

i grieve the time i spent outside, feeling the earth beneath me and the frequency of the breeze. i grieve the gait that kept me moving through the world with magnificent endurance. i grieve a version of me that may have never existed outside of performativity.

RIP to my youthful swagger,

the one that masked the pain, the one that fronted masculinity and certainty, the one that spent as much time convincing me as it did anyone else that i felt physically fine and walked with empowered ease.

RIP to the state of mind that accompanied the form,

the one that ignored the loss of cartilage, the dislocated patellas, and the disintegrating lumbar spine; the one that held perspective better than the body held weight; the one that understood that, no matter how i feel, i need to be moving and preferably outside.

but also,

RIP to the denial of my corporeal reality.

the one that framed my limits as a lack, a failure, or a deformity. the one that pushed me too far and injured me further. the one that felt disconnected from physicality.

perhaps, even without the swagger, this is a better me.