The line
It’s nine in the morning, and I lie face-down and half naked on a padded table, my face squeezed into an open oval so I can see the diamond-patterned commercial carpeting that lines the floor of my physical therapist’s office. It’s nine, and I’m on the table because I’m over the line.
One’s mind wanders when the ultrasound wand is greasily meandering up and down one’s neck. Under the ministrations of “tooling,” a sadistic process that involves poking the pencil-sized rounded tip of a plastic want into interstitial spaces and small gaps between vertebrae, not so much. But the ultrasound is good for thinking. I lie there, drifting, and I think about the line.
I first learned about the line in my early twenties, when I began to have muscle-knotting spasms seemingly out of nowhere. My lower back would, at whim, just refuse to function as normal. I began to have days when I couldn’t get out of bed, made elderly by capricious muscle. Somewhere there’s a pain scale that simply measures how easy it is for you to get out of bed and go to the bathroom.
So began my relationship with my pain, and with the line. The line demarcates that imaginary point that divides carefree functioning from the distracting vacuum-suck of pain. Those who have dealt with such issues know immediately what I mean, though they may have a different name for it. Under the line, life is free of distracting announcements from the central nervous system. Movement is unimpaired, as much as that is possible in modern human existence, and there is no need to surreptitiously seek relief during meetings or drives or fitful nights.
The line is razor thin. It’s “one mil thick,” as the garbage bag commercials used to say. It’s a hair trigger, and it means the difference between a long walk and a cup of tea that’s used to down a muscle relaxant. As much as we don’t want to think about the line, we think about the line. We wonder how close we are. We do the mathematics of pain, juggling complicated algorithms that assign weights to movement and stasis and burden and cold. The line is invisible but not to be ignored.
Those who know the line know the shameful feeling of near-jealousy when confronted with someone who wears their disability on the outside. Of course we don’t want to be that person. Of course we spend our every day in gratitude for our movement, our capabilities, the miracle of muscle fiber and neurotransmitter. But there are days, and we will admit it, there are days when we wish someone could see pain, maybe as a streak of blue on the skin or a radiant glow from the affected area. Maybe in another universe, pain makes a sound only discernible by those who want to take the time to listen.
There’s a silent community of pain when I board the bus, or when I go to the store. We are legion, and we hide it, and we don’t want to talk about it because someone has it worse and we’re still on our feet and we still have jobs and why are we even pretending as though it’s something worth notice? Life hurts, man. Cross the line, pay the price.
There on that table, two people working now, working to use their hands to find the pain and drive it from me, maybe drain it onto that diamond-patterned rug to be washed away later by the nighttime cleaning crew, there on that table, pain is the all star. Pain is the invited guest, to be discussed and diagrammed and banished. These people know the line, and they will push the pain down under it and give me worksheets filled with line drawings of imaginary hurt people, doing exercises to make the hurt go away. And I’ll take the sheets, and I’ll thank them very much, and I will go about my life with the knowledge that the sheets help, but the line always wins. No matter how much music and meditation and morphine and muscle fiber there is in the world.
The line always wins.
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