Chronic

^ This piece was conceived in my writing group, and I was able to dig pretty deep for it. It is not poetry this time, but prose. I hope you enjoy it, or appreciate it.

The weary world wreaked havoc, day in, day out, breathe in, breathe out. Worrisome weeks passed, sometimes months, but the chromatic feelings pursued him, taking a stranglehold, until he would nearly choke.

The pins and needles in his periphery began about seventeen years ago, planting themselves in his left toes and the balls of his feet, slowly evolving as they sleepily stretched out across the ankles and rapidly raced up his calves, until just below the knee. The fuzzy sensations in his extremities turned cold, then numb, but thankfully the severe shooting pains were intermittent, and mostly only bothered him when was about to fall asleep.

Some days he would linger in bed, in his lush six hundred thread count sheets of silver, refusing to answer prying phone calls, neglecting pestering email from his friends, his family, even illustrious men who just wanted to spend some time with him, share his body, covet his secrets. These loved ones, and admirers, fell to the wayside in these sterling moments, swept up in a dust pan, and discarded into the trash without a second glance.

His doctor asked him if he felt depressed. He laughed at her until she rephrased. "Are you depressed because of how you feel, or does how you feel cause you to feel more depressed?" His silky voice purred: "Does it really matter at this point?" She nodded her head, just nodded her head, as if she had heard this a million times over and over again.

His cocker spaniel, Billy, gave him some sort of purpose, and he was a responsible pet owner, Billy had a fenced in yard as his playground three times a day, and his water was always fresh, and there was always food in his dish, maybe even a morsel from the dinner table those days when he was too weak to swallow.

The nature of being chronic, he surmised, is that nothing necessarily or drastically gets better or worse; it's just a state of being, like floating in a translucent pool of water, you just sort of drift from moment to moment. Weekdays become weekends. Some mystical nights became luminous days. He would sometimes take advantage in those precious times and maintain some of his relationships by receiving guests in his home, or by going to see a film, or even having dinner somewhere inexpensive and quiet, something he could afford, since he had a limited income, and rarely allowed others to pay his way.

He had looked fear in the face many, many times until he just didn't care. He'd learned to sing in his late thirties, to pass the time, and even played the guitar to James Taylor, with Billy as his audience: "Oh I've see fire and I've seen rain..." he would croon. Someday there would be a cure he thought, and he wondered where he would be. He hated that feeling of drifting through life, but for not it is what it is. He learned to stop judging and just let things be. Let things be. For now, he would sleep, think of Paris and the Champs E'Lysee. It was nice to dream. He still had that.