• Sixty-One

    21

    I wake to an exhaustion that tries to wrestle me back into sleep. Getting out of bed, I perform my morning stretches – the little I can do to get some motion into my neck and back without aggravating anything. I’m sure my body’s a minefield. Years of chronic pain, of anxiety, of obsessive introspection, has groomed my mind, and my sympathetic nervous system, to fixate on anything untoward, and then exaggerate whatever’s reported. While I’m lying on my belly, arms outstretched, and arcing my shoulders and upper torso back and forth twenty-four times, I feel if I just fall still, I’ll drop back into sleep. It’s a weird juxtaposition;…