'Flash' writing anthology about chronic pain - submissions welcome!
When he was dying, I swallowed a CoCodamol before bedtime as if it were hot chocolate. I craftily attributed my zen-like calm in the face of helping Dad as he pissed blood into a plastic pot at 3am – I don’t know what’s happening to me, he said, again and again – to my sensible study of The Tibetan Book of The Dead. It was a lie, but a lie that helped.
Author website: The Diary I Didn’t Write
U.K.
Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can
Then you’re ill
can’t work
can’t walk
can’t bear talk
or remember how no pain felt
can count on the hand you can’t lift
your friends
and family
can’t work
or provide
can’t afford pride
or holidays
you manage Christmas, on plastic
can’t walk your children to school
it’s uphill
you’re ill
can’t work
can’t live
can’t provide –
the part that was you
the man that was you
the pride in you
died
Try not to care
that the love of your life
is no longer your wife
but your carer
Work as hard as you can
for as long as you can
United Kingdom
M.E. destroys one life
and ruins more.
Fatigue replaces rage.
Accept it.
Author website
United Kingdom
A
man is
ill. Whispered
recollections
of what he once was
are all that sustain him.
He has no hope. His aching
visions of what should have been kill
comfort. What could have been is a lie.
He has no hope. He has no future. He
has only now. Life took revenge for a
life too well lived. He was a man out
of time. Now, there is nothing but
time. Resilient, he bears
it. He will not die. He
will suffer, always.
He will not die.
He does not,
cannot,
live.
United Kingdom
Pain stitched into each
joint, he withers and fades. A
mutilated life.
United Kingdom
The way the scent of the air changes as the day goes on: the warming sweetness of morning; the sharp resin of fir trees as the sun heats the day; the cool, soft evening air with the ground and lake and all the waving leaves mixed in. The way the early evening light strikes the birches and makes them chiaroscuro dramatic. The way my feet burn. The smudged charcoal underbellies of terns over the green water. Their sliding paths through the air. This deep, stabbing pain in both temples. The buzzing flight of sugar-fuelled hummingbirds. The way my entire body is filled with pain and unable to move from this chair. Heavily, here, just so. That bird, there, hopping from branch to branch. Almost hidden. The feel of my skin as a gentle breeze touches the side of my face. The things I long to do. That dragonfly, there, and the sun behind its wings. Every dancing leaf. The air again: changing.
Canada
If pleasure is the absence of pain,
then pain comes first.
In the planter outside my front door,
a wren’s nest whorls down
to darkness. The nestlings chirr when I pass by,
or when the wind’s fingers brush too close,
as if the wind and I are mothers,
returning with meat, as if refreshed
sensation means relief from pain,
meaning pain comes last –
like a shadow, sleek and well-fed,
or a body’s imprint in the bed.
I grow to love you, dear familiar.
United States
generate
stay
slow
seal
here
Belgium
For some of us the universe is a dark pit, where pain finds its home, nesting and laying eggs of destruction. The whole life reduced to this crumbled, shrank, shelled body of pain. It takes over your whole existence. Nothing can keep the pain at bay at this point, not even your best “mind-over-matter” efforts or hardest of drugs. It is torturing your soul and crippling your body. Overwhelming and ubiquitous. An epitome of Alone. A hungry demon.
It claims you when you are too exhausted to fight. Now it has me in its claws, roaring like a wild beast, feasting on my bones, chewing my sanity and spitting out my dignity. I am too weak to resist. My presence is ethereal and fragile. I am not really here any more. I do not live anymore. I merely exist. And that is more humiliating and dehumanising than being dead.
Slovenia
Disease is a discord, friction, dissonance, a flatted fifth every righteous composer wants to avoid, but hearing it in music it makes the tune much more interesting and edgy.
So, no, I don’t really believe in controlling or managing a disease as something external, as a bank account, or as a puppy that needs to be trained to fetch, sit and bark whenever you think it’s appropriate; or a dissonant chord that needs to be rewritten so that a tune can sound neat again.
What I believe you can do is try to understand it, understand yourself and your disease without being intimidated by the managerial narrative, economic discourse or regimen requirements. Embrace it as a part of you that needs to be heard, and healed. And dance to its tune, even if others can’t hear music in this messy noise, and even if your back is stiff as hell.
Slovenia
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