Essays

One.  The physical therapist asks if you can describe the pain. You can: The tendons around your knee feel like desert-hot barbed wire. Someone has raised your kneecap like a lid, poured shards of broken glass into it, and sewed the lid up again with Frankenstein stitches. Or like razor-sharp jacks – like, the children’s…

Unfortunately, my brick wall has become smaller over the years, or less high, with bricks softer in their sable paper texture, more dissolved overall. Some bricks have hidden, tiny holes the size of my little finger on my left hand, where I let some people in. Some people who get in, without a little struggle…

It has been five years since my face collapsed on one side and an emergency room physician diagnosed me with Bell’s palsy.

I wasn’t ready to say goodbye, but after three years of psychotherapy with Dr. M, it was time to let go.

I’m stuck at the traffic light on Yale and Colorado and I’m thinking about the size of the nail, the nail the Romans hammered through Jesus’ feet.

I grew up in the Dark Ages for people with disabilities.