13.3.07

burnt pudding, you know what I mean

There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken. Like bones. Who feels their femur as anything more than part of a leg generally, and part of a pedestal for the body more generally, including the feet, hips, etc? It's when something snaps or cracks or pops; when an x-ray could reveal a fracture (hairline, they say sometimes, which I find utterly charming) that you become acutely aware of the bone itself. That it is longer and thicker than you thought or thinner than you thought, or just placed differently than you had expected when you came crashing down on it. "Funny, I don't remember that there...not exactly like that..."

I've never had a broken bone (knock on wood, or bone, or china, whatever works), so I'm not entirely sure of the analogy. Of course, you knew it was an analogy. Or a metaphor. Or a metonymy. (I'm not on the clock, you figure it out.) In any case, I've never felt just like this -- the physical sensation of nausea so near to me at all times. All I need do is recall, think, remember, feel in a certain way (or in several certain ways) and suddenly I'm mock heaving. The heave is real, of course, but no organic cause determines it. There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken, and they're not all bones apparently.

I should be smelling burnt pudding, be aphasic or Germanophobic (wait, I already am the latter), or at least beset by a grand mal, as the quaint expression went. How am I stuck here with my paltry nausea? My silly little stomach-churning anguish, my faint-feeling languish? I should find myself in an anatomical book illustration, a stick figure peeling her skin back coyly so the gaze can penetrate beneath. Am I not transparent? Do you people not see the cause and the effect? Do you not smell the burnt pudding? How can I write under these conditions?