On Foot

Seven days have passed?  My god.

I did not think  on writing, but I felt it, I could feel its impression gilded lightly across my shoulder blades, present but definitively behind me, close by, for what apparently became one hundred and sixty eight hours.  This is peculiar, as though I had been walking briskly toward the sun confident that I could feel my own shadow warming my heels with every step, only to take the time to actually look backward for a moment and find the damn thing lagging fully a week behind me.  I mean, okay I wasn’t looking, but come on.  Someone somewhere give me a break, this man is clearly tottering into the dotage of his 23rd year with the paint peeling from his clattering earthly parts.

Speaking of which, let me tell you about my foot.

The left one, to be specific.  Somewhere in the vast expanse of time between musings I discovered an incredibly acute pain spotting through the skin of my heel, on the right side of this appendage, toward the back and not so low that I walk upon it usually.  Except this completely uninteresting span of foot didn’t look any different than the other spans which, gentlemanly in their compsure, did not hurt.  I scrutinized the thing for many a passing moment, its ruddy plate offering nothing by way of clues to its sudden and very unwelcome rebellion.  The poking and prodding did little to enhance my interrogation.

I presented the malfunctioning thing to my lovely girlfriend, who took the inner workings of my extremities as uniquely uninteresting (ho ho!) and kindly told me to get my gnarled hoof out of her face.  She has since gone home (I miss her so!), which is a frustration since the blighted part has finally yielded tangible evidence that yes, something is at least modestly untoward.

It has cracked.

This bothers me, since bodies do not, traditionally, crack with such ease or manners.  Moreover, even if the body could crack, like a stone will sometimes crack, it strikes me as supremely uncanny that it would crack, as it seems to have cracked, from the inside out.  I feel as though eldritch lines have been cast, an unnatural geometry written toward some unkind deed or intention, and through the process of some unearthly rounding error, a bit of black math has veered from  its hateful trajectory and taken up residence in my god damn foot.

My sweet girl has, perhaps rightly, ordered me to see a doctor.  I can’t help but counter that I should present myself to the sainted office of a cleric or witchdoctor because that is the sort of thing a rational person does when confronted with evidence we live in a cruel and monstrous universe.  And so the argument goes about.  We bicker like this sometimes, and she can’t fully come to grips with the enormous affection I hold for her afterward.  I try to explain, but it is a poor reflection of her grace at best.

Because when your one and only has the talent and good graces to sincerely tell you no, she doesn’t think there are any ancient gods in Lake Ontario to begin with, much less any with the propensity to gnaw through to the waking world by way of a political science major’s feet, you know she’ll love you no matter what.