Loud Quiet

I should have known, when I felt the world tilt and saw the ground swirl up around behind me, that it was going to be a bad night. My wrists softened the blow my ass received and, as I went inside, they began to throb.

This is a new era. The era of #foxfirelove expired when I met his wife and found out how excited she was for me to move in and become her second wife.

This is the era of #soakingwetshoulders.
He cried on mine. I cried on his. Somewhere along the way, we found love. I'm happy now. I'm a partner instead of a parent or a participant. Still, it's only been three months and he hasn't experienced the mother of all flares yet.

It happened tonight. Yesterday was wonderful with romantic gifts and candlelit wine dinners, parties, and kid free hotel rooms after. So adult and romantic and lovely. Today was doughnuts and coffee with old friends and home again home again, jiggety jig, after the grocery store.

Made dinner that I was suddenly too tired to eat. Fell on my ass in a most graceful way, by trying to catch myself on Jason's pant's leg and almost pantsing him. Then, a last minute decision to watch an extra episode of Charmed, washed my faced, did a load of laundry...

Then, slid gracefully into a dark cool bed. It was too warm. That should have been my second hint. By then, I'd laid on my back, my stomach, my knees (child's pose) both left and right fetal positions and yes, I'd even tried both cat and camel poses before the tears came.

Anyone with fibro will tell you, clothes are too heavy and hugs hurt. I describe it as waves of electrical battery acid that roll over your body. I moaned, groaned, cried, screamed, begged, bargained... I even prayed.

Jason told me he wished he could kiss the pain away and my head, particularly my brain, wanted to wiggle free and flee the scene of human speech, it's tone, rhythm, and screechy clickity click nonsense like angelic glyphs on a chalkboard.

His warm hand soothed me and made me less likely to gouge his tongue or my eardrums out. The gently whispered words were like adamantian steel claws shreading at my skin, his touch like glass, my own cries made me want to giggle and flee at finally having reached the freedom of insanity. But his presence called me and I could hear a deep calm drumbeat in my ear, his heartbeat. I breathed until my heart matched the tone.

Fibro flares that keep you in bed with a low grade fever and make you sluggish and nonsocial are what everyone talks about. "I hurt a lot. I sleep a lot. Must be my fibro flare."

Well how about this? My skin is too heavy. Sounds hit me like sharp objects, smells like fists to the stomach. Clothes feel like chain mail made of barbed wire. Taste? Cereal is about what I can tolerate. The sympathy you give me is like a warm blanket that you wrap me in. The pain is still all inside but now I'm hot, claustrophobic, and muffled, and ashamed.

Tonight I cried out in pain. Not just, "holy fuck that hurt" but instead a "why why why why why why why" with drool and snot and tears and sweat dripping all over your nice cozy blanket of sympathetic pity.

And you don't have an answer for "why me" or "how come". So now you're stressed and in pain and triggering some memories of your own.

Fibro is like labor. But with labor, often at the end you've earned something, a new baby! With fibro, after the same amount of pain and sickness and hysteria, you're only incentive is that it starts all again.

At the end of fibro, the only thing you have is the dark, bitter night, the pain, confusion, exhaustion, loneliness, and the guaranteed it'll all happened again, very soon.

You're on the wash board, folks.
And the infidel is your own body.
It's you.

Then I get to get up and try to be thankful for oranges.