17

I dream again I’m running.

There is a freedom in being so unencumbered, in feeling nothing but the speed of zipping through the world with an abandon I wouldn’t be able to duplicate in life, even if my right leg was still capable.

This is all that’s important now: the motion. I revel in the velocity. There’s very little awareness of my surrounds, but it’s open terrain. Concrete pavements so that I’m thinking civilization but, distantly, mountains also. I don’t think there are any other people here with me either. I think this place has been built just for me, and for just this purpose.

Running.

If I could, I would stay here – in this place without limitations. I used to have another recurring dream before the car struck me – I would sprint until I was going so fast I knew that if I leaped, I would fly, and that’s exactly what would happen all the time. I would prove the impossible to myself. Brimming with exhilaration, I would soar into the sky.

This is similar, except for the ultimate outcome.

Something else splinters into my consciousness now – something initially unexpected, but which is totally familiar once I recognize it: the realization that I can’t run any more.

There’s the immediate disappointment.

The regret.

And then growing dread.

I wake, although it’s not abruptly or with any shock. It’s elevating slowly back into the world, and with that I feel my body; the heaviness of the doona pressing on me; my right foot scrunched up, the skin on my sole all tight and hard like it’s been lacquered, the epoch of the big toe – the epicenter of my Complex Regional Pain Syndrome – burning.

I lay there, trying to disconnect from the sensations in my right foot, although I’ve already felt that separation. You never think of yourself as anything other than whole. There’s no distinguishing between limbs. It’s all you. But ever since the Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, the right foot has felt almost independent from the rest of me.

And then I pick up the fractures in my wholeness – the right foot, the mental health stuff that’s solidified into its own slimy entity that lurks in the forefront of my mind, and then it’s me, but it’s not me, because it’s almost like my identity is split into what I am and what I thought I’d be.

The freedom’s gone now.

All that remains is the weight of life.

And the sleeplessness.