“There is a place that pain takes you. I haven’t known this place before. That is a privilege, isn’t it? But I know it well now. It is both vast and minuscule. It is as far as my mind can travel and as contained as the blades of grass under my feet. It is my body. It is hard to make sense of the fragility of it. It’s just a body, he said, and I try to make that true, but as I walk I can’t be anything else, I am all body, only body, at its mercy. It becomes everything and then it starts to fail. My steps grow wobbly, my knees weaken and then buckle.”
―
Charlotte McConaghy,
Wild Dark Shore