Seizure
Pain came and stole my body from me in the middle of the night. In middle of many nights before, she’d been plotting to chip away one piece at a time. Pain was a woman who worked her way through cursory paths, finding pin sized holes of weakness, pockets of vulnerability. She had read Sun Tzu, and she knew when my ammunition was weak, when my troops were distracted with love and other creative pursuits. She had been hiding in the crevices where she honed her skills to be sharp. Pain’s complexity was that she wasn’t purely evil, she had a job to do. Her job was to wake me up, crashing down like thunder stroke as the dawn broke the fourteen-hour winter night casting a chill over Berlin.
Wiley as a sleepless scavenger she seized me by the small of my back and bit down hard. I awoke hyperventilating, gasping to catch my breath from the shock. She was stabbing me in the back. I had loved pain, so I felt betrayed. I had trusted our relationship up until that moment. I felt I had an intimate understanding of enduring and even embracing her circuitous ways. I thought I understood the extent of my own masochism, the wild rides it had taken me on in the years. But I had a false sense of quiet surrender, the ritual of it, the catharsis. I wasn’t prepared for the new twist and she knew it as she bit down harder.
What was actually happening was my heart was breaking open, but I didn’t know that as she bit into my muscles, my tendons, my fascia, my ligaments. Then the shaking began, electricity shooting up through the net of my nervous system in my fingers. Neurapraxia is the warning sign before the body start to go numb. I started to sweat at the memory of touching electricity as a child, shocking myself only partially on accident. But I did not consent to these tingles in my ring finger and they frightened me. Don’t forsake me screamed my body from across the room, as pain held her hostage while smiling. All I could do is breath in and out, promising her I wouldn’t stop this simple act of defiance, as pain squeezed me into her vice.
Pain had many acts for her performance. After the initial spasms, she retreated momentarily, letting my body recuperate. When she came back, she brought with her an arsenal of impact tools, which she effectively employed on the backs of my knees, the soles of my feet, my sacrum, between my shoulder blades. A series of tiny metal hammers hitting me from the inside out. The same places love kissed just days before, flooding me with wetness was now strangled by pain’s grip. I heard myself saying so many times imagine pain and pleasure to be a continuation on the same spectrum. I coughed up a laugh at my ignorance as pain introduced a peppering of nausea. She was not done as she shot a migraine induced hallucination behind the eyes as an appropriate digestif. While the concentration, the mound of it resided in my lower back, outposts chattered amongst themselves in all parts of my body, bustling along like busy commuters on the subway. Now at the elbows, now at the hips, now in the groin, now they gathered feverishly between my temples.
Pain wouldn’t torture me to the point of passing out, she edged with my exhaustion like an expert in torture tactics. When she sensed I was becoming numb to her sharpness, she distracted me with an uncontrollable itch on the top layer of my skin, a sensation that my top epidermal layer has been stretched out like a pair of hose. They won’t rip, but they no longer fit. I could not uncoil the skin from my bones and so it becomes red and bristled like a porcupine. All clothing painful, sheets like sandpaper, only hot water in the bathtub a temporary relief. When my skin re-emerged into the oxygen, it cried out again, reaching to me like a child to its mother but I was helpless and despondent because I was in another room, another life, watching pain work.
I didn’t know how to bargain with pain. She laughed in my face at the thought I would try. She wanted nothing less than my absolute attention and focus towards her alone. She wanted more than just me, she wanted an army of skilled workers, of devotees listening and worshipping her. Therapists. Doctors. Empathetic listeners. Safe counsel. Quiet spaces, limited movement, surrender. She wanted my surrender.
She took me on a tour of my body, showing me the things I had refused to see for so long. I had neglected the complex integrated system of pulleys and levers. She ran through each nook and cranny drawing my attention to the shortness of tendons, the overworked joints, the weak muscles. You’ve been neglecting this, she points out, but I won’t, I’ll give it all the attention it deserves. She gave me a vicious grin. I knew she was right. I used all my crisis management skills to stay calm, quiet and resolved to try a soft but determined approach. In a hostage situation, one must not panic, one must not give the sense that there will be an ambush. We cannot afford casualties in this process. We must make her believe she is winning, that her demands are being met. We will let her play her dirty tricks for the short term while we build our ammunition, while we sneak in through the back door to bring my body back.
Most importantly, I would not ignore her. I would not anesthetize ourselves to her needs. Maybe I had been for some time, and she has had enough. So I listened. Tell us what you have to say. We are listening. We want to understand your message. And she softened. She relaxed momentarily, my shaking body in her hands flailing like a ragdoll in a dog’s mouth, limp but still alive.
I found a German chiropractor. She didn’t speak English. My German was weak. We came together in the universal language of the body. She ran her strong fingers over my vertebrae and measured the distance between my feet. This would be a delicate intervention. She held my head in between her palms with my neck at the kind of angle I’d only seen assassins on TV use to quickly eradicate their targets. One sharp move in the wrong direction and my body would no longer belong to me or pain, but to a much larger, more permanent force. I took a deep inhale and heard the sharp crack in my neck. Following was a flood of release. She made a few similar moves down my spine and then locked my left hip in a kind of Grecian wrestling move. Ein, zwei, drei, vier. She exhaled. I exhaled. And then I laughed, and pain began to slowly, cautiously retreat. She was beginning to sense her work was coming to a close, but she would hang around for a few more hours, monitoring the safe passage of my body back to me. As if I was returning from a long vacation where the dog sitter had become quite used to watching my pet, resistant and untrusting that I was really suited for permanent ownership. Pain watched my every move as I started to occupy parts of my body, first left leg, left arm, right arm, neck. She was still tethered to my right leg and sacrum. After a deep bow to the chiropractor shaman, I hobbled home. Or round was complete.
Seizure
Pain came and stole my body from me in the middle of the night. In middle of many nights before, she’d been plotting to chip away one piece at a time. Pain was a woman who worked her way through cursory paths, finding pin sized holes of weakness, pockets of vulnerability. She had read Sun Tzu, and she knew when my ammunition was weak, when my troops were distracted with love and other creative pursuits. She had been hiding in the crevices where she honed her skills to be sharp. Pain’s complexity was that she wasn’t purely evil, she had a job to do. Her job was to wake me up, crashing down like thunder stroke as the dawn broke the fourteen-hour winter night casting a chill over Berlin.
Wiley as a sleepless scavenger she seized me by the small of my back and bit down hard. I awoke hyperventilating, gasping to catch my breath from the shock. She was stabbing me in the back. I had loved pain, so I felt betrayed. I had trusted our relationship up until that moment. I felt I had an intimate understanding of enduring and even embracing her circuitous ways. I thought I understood the extent of my own masochism, the wild rides it had taken me on in the years. But I had a false sense of quiet surrender, the ritual of it, the catharsis. I wasn’t prepared for the new twist and she knew it as she bit down harder.
What was actually happening was my heart was breaking open, but I didn’t know that as she bit into my muscles, my tendons, my fascia, my ligaments. Then the shaking began, electricity shooting up through the net of my nervous system in my fingers. Neurapraxia is the warning sign before the body start to go numb. I started to sweat at the memory of touching electricity as a child, shocking myself only partially on accident. But I did not consent to these tingles in my ring finger and they frightened me. Don’t forsake me screamed my body from across the room, as pain held her hostage while smiling. All I could do is breath in and out, promising her I wouldn’t stop this simple act of defiance, as pain squeezed me into her vice.
Pain had many acts for her performance. After the initial spasms, she retreated momentarily, letting my body recuperate. When she came back, she brought with her an arsenal of impact tools, which she effectively employed on the backs of my knees, the soles of my feet, my sacrum, between my shoulder blades. A series of tiny metal hammers hitting me from the inside out. The same places love kissed just days before, flooding me with wetness was now strangled by pain’s grip. I heard myself saying so many times imagine pain and pleasure to be a continuation on the same spectrum. I coughed up a laugh at my ignorance as pain introduced a peppering of nausea. She was not done as she shot a migraine induced hallucination behind the eyes as an appropriate digestif. While the concentration, the mound of it resided in my lower back, outposts chattered amongst themselves in all parts of my body, bustling along like busy commuters on the subway. Now at the elbows, now at the hips, now in the groin, now they gathered feverishly between my temples.
Pain wouldn’t torture me to the point of passing out, she edged with my exhaustion like an expert in torture tactics. When she sensed I was becoming numb to her sharpness, she distracted me with an uncontrollable itch on the top layer of my skin, a sensation that my top epidermal layer has been stretched out like a pair of hose. They won’t rip, but they no longer fit. I could not uncoil the skin from my bones and so it becomes red and bristled like a porcupine. All clothing painful, sheets like sandpaper, only hot water in the bathtub a temporary relief. When my skin re-emerged into the oxygen, it cried out again, reaching to me like a child to its mother but I was helpless and despondent because I was in another room, another life, watching pain work.
I didn’t know how to bargain with pain. She laughed in my face at the thought I would try. She wanted nothing less than my absolute attention and focus towards her alone. She wanted more than just me, she wanted an army of skilled workers, of devotees listening and worshipping her. Therapists. Doctors. Empathetic listeners. Safe counsel. Quiet spaces, limited movement, surrender. She wanted my surrender.
She took me on a tour of my body, showing me the things I had refused to see for so long. I had neglected the complex integrated system of pulleys and levers. She ran through each nook and cranny drawing my attention to the shortness of tendons, the overworked joints, the weak muscles. You’ve been neglecting this, she points out, but I won’t, I’ll give it all the attention it deserves. She gave me a vicious grin. I knew she was right. I used all my crisis management skills to stay calm, quiet and resolved to try a soft but determined approach. In a hostage situation, one must not panic, one must not give the sense that there will be an ambush. We cannot afford casualties in this process. We must make her believe she is winning, that her demands are being met. We will let her play her dirty tricks for the short term while we build our ammunition, while we sneak in through the back door to bring my body back.
Most importantly, I would not ignore her. I would not anesthetize ourselves to her needs. Maybe I had been for some time, and she has had enough. So I listened. Tell us what you have to say. We are listening. We want to understand your message. And she softened. She relaxed momentarily, my shaking body in her hands flailing like a ragdoll in a dog’s mouth, limp but still alive.
I found a German chiropractor. She didn’t speak English. My German was weak. We came together in the universal language of the body. She ran her strong fingers over my vertebrae and measured the distance between my feet. This would be a delicate intervention. She held my head in between her palms with my neck at the kind of angle I’d only seen assassins on TV use to quickly eradicate their targets. One sharp move in the wrong direction and my body would no longer belong to me or pain, but to a much larger, more permanent force. I took a deep inhale and heard the sharp crack in my neck. Following was a flood of release. She made a few similar moves down my spine and then locked my left hip in a kind of Grecian wrestling move. Ein, zwei, drei, vier. She exhaled. I exhaled. And then I laughed, and pain began to slowly, cautiously retreat. She was beginning to sense her work was coming to a close, but she would hang around for a few more hours, monitoring the safe passage of my body back to me. As if I was returning from a long vacation where the dog sitter had become quite used to watching my pet, resistant and untrusting that I was really suited for permanent ownership. Pain watched my every move as I started to occupy parts of my body, first left leg, left arm, right arm, neck. She was still tethered to my right leg and sacrum. After a deep bow to the chiropractor shaman, I hobbled home. Or round was complete.
EPB
EPB is a writer, visual artist, performer & researcher who plays in the space between theory and practice. In her writing, she parallels her observations of the art world with academic discourse and the politics of sex work.