This is an unfinished narrative I started in February, 2005. I don't know if I'll finish it or not.
She didn’t understand what was happening to her. All she knew was that today she’d woken up feeling completely different from any other day. She looked the same: same brown hair, same blue eyes, same small stature complete with way too many curves, but she didn’t feel the same. The day started normally. Her alarm woke her up at the godawful hour of 6 AM. She opened her eyes, and paused. Something was different, but she couldn’t place it. She tried to shake off the feeling, but it resisted. Resignedly, she decided to just ignore it and go about her normal daily routine.
She got dressed, checking to see if there was anything physically different. She was almost disappointed when she realized that everything was the same. The pimple she’d gotten yesterday was even still there on her cheek, reminding her that pressure causes things to explode. She sighed, brushed her hair, did her makeup, and headed out to the kitchen. She was running late, as usual. She grabbed her SlimFast on her way out the door and headed towards her car. It was only when she’d gotten there that she realized she had left her purse inside the house. Luckily, she had also forgotten to lock the house up. Annoyed at herself, she rushed inside, grabbed her purse and her keys, and headed back to her car.
Yet when she tried to get into her car, she was shocked to find that her knees wouldn’t move the way they normally did. Thinking back to earlier that morning, she remembered that she’d had a little trouble getting dressed but had just written it off as not being awake yet. This was different, though. Her knees not only were stiff, they felt like there was an iron inside them, grilling them from the inside out.
“This can’t be good,” she thought to herself. “Okay, I’ll just go back inside and call the office and tell them I’m going to be late this morning.” She nodded to herself and felt better, assuming that in a few hours, the strange pain and stiffness would be gone and she’d go back to her normal, albeit boring, day. She went inside and called her boss. He wasn’t pleased with her. She’d always had a tendency to be late, and he was wary of her excuse of “not feeling well”. She apologized profusely and said there was nothing she could do and hoped to feel better in a couple of hours. He muttered, “Whatever you say, princess. Just get here today, and you better not be late again tomorrow.”
Mornings recently had been hard for her. She’d been slow getting out of bed, and her normal morning activities had been taking her just a little bit longer than they used to. She assumed this was just a result of her “getting old”, as she thought of it. She was only 22, but she felt that she was getting old, that her life was already almost half over. Her friends and her family didn’t know she felt this way. They all assumed she felt just the same as every other vibrant young 20something. They were all wrong.
Now that she had called work, she wasn’t sure what to do. Her knees still burned and they felt stiff, like they’d frozen. “Odd that pain that feels so hot can make my knees feel frozen stiff,” she muttered to herself. This seemed to be a terrible twist of fate for her. She was supposed to go out to dinner tonight with her boyfriend of 3 years, and she had a suspicion that he was going to propose to her. She couldn’t be sure, of course, but she felt pretty certain that he’d be proposing to her soon, and her instincts were telling her he was going to do it tonight. Of course, though, he wouldn’t be able to do it tonight if she was stuck late at work.
She walked over to her favorite armchair and sat down slowly in it. “It’s challenging to sit without bending your knees much,” she mused. “Oh well, I’ll just sit here for a little bit and the pain will go away.” She sat, and waited. Half an hour passed and the pain still lingered, though it did seem to have lessened. She was hopeful it would disappear soon. Suddenly the phone rang.
She got up and ran to get the phone. It was her boss, telling her to take the rest of the day off to make sure she felt better. She hung up and immediately her knees felt better and she decided to spend the rest of the day hiking.
That’s what she would have liked to have happen right after the phone rang. Instead, she tried to jump up and was shocked to find that her knees, frozen stiff half an hour ago, were now frozen solid. She couldn’t move them at all in any direction. At this point, she started to become worried. She decided that, no matter what, her knees were going to move in time for her to get this phone call.
She stared at her knees, willing them to move. No luck. Nothing. She tried to think back to what she had seen when she had looked in the mirror that morning. She had focused on her face, as was her habit; had she looked at her knees? She couldn’t remember and decided that she should try to take her pants off to see if there was anything visibly wrong with her knees.
The phone was still ringing. She unzipped her pants and slowly shimmied them down her legs without getting up from the chair. What she saw shocked her and comforted her at the same time. Her knees were red and swollen. While the swelling scared her, it did help her to know that there was something visually wrong with her knees. She now had something to look at, a picture to associate with the pain and stiffness. She bent her torso down and reached for her left knee with her hands. It was warm to the touch and tender.
She wouldn’t have any of this. Her knees were going to get better: that’s all there was to it. And the first step of that was for her to get her knees moving again so she could pick up the damn phone… which suddenly stopped ringing. Her machine picked up: “Hello, I’m not available right now. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” Whoever was on the other line hung up, leaving her glad she hadn’t somehow forced herself to get up and get the phone.
“Back to fixing my knees, then,” she thought. She gently wrapped her hands around her left knee and tried to straighten it. The pain that rushed through her and the resistance she felt worried her. She had only managed to straighten her knee by a couple of degrees and this pain was already worse than anything she’d ever experienced before. She gritted her teeth and moved her knee back to its original position. The pain seemed to be slightly less than before, but it was hard for her to tell. Tears began forming in her eyes and she wondered if her mascara would begin to run down her face, streaking her cheeks with black. That’s how she was beginning to feel, so she decided that worrying about her mascara running was utterly ridiculous in a time like this and if her face was to be stained black, at least it would somewhat reflect the pain she was in.
Somehow comforted by the image of her face being able to reflect the pain, she gritted her teeth and straightened her left leg just a little bit more. The pain came like a needle without a point: dull, seering, and brutal. The tears she’d noticed forming began to fall. She moved her knee back to its original position again. She didn’t know how much time had passed since the phone rang. One of the reasons she was constantly late for work was that she refused to wear a watch. She felt that time bound her and restricted her creativity, and creativity was essential in her job as a graphic designer.
She continued trying to move her knee: up, down, up, and down. The amount of effort she was exerting just to move her knee in the smallest motions possible was ridiculous. There was no reason that she could fathom that it would require such effort to do such a simple thing, but it was. How long was she supposed to keep this up? When was the pain going to go away? …Did she have any Advil in the house?
Now that was a question she knew the answer to: yes, yes she did have Advil. For once, she was grateful for being female and cursed with headaches. The Advil was in the bathroom medicine cabinet. The armchair she was sitting in was next to her kitchen counter. She often ate her breakfast here when she wasn’t running late. Her kitchen flowed into the dining room seamlessly: there weren’t any walls between the two, just different floorings. To get to the medicine cabinet, she would need to, first of all, find some way to actually stand up. That, she felt, was step one. She’d worry about actually getting to the bathroom after she’d managed to just get up.
"Okay. I just need to get up. Just get up. Right. I can do this." She'd never noticed how low this chair was. She felt like the weight of the world was sitting on her knee, that actually getting up was next to impossible. But it had to be done. Not only did the Advil reside in the bathroom, the toilet was also there, and she was starting to feel the need to use it. (Just how long had she been sitting here anyways?) She started to lean forward, feeling her weight shift onto her thighs. Forward some more, and the weight hit her knees. Her right knee burned its indignation at this movement and kept itself immobile. She leaned left, transferring most of her weight onto her left leg.
She was halfway up now, balanced on her left leg, gripping the chair’s armrests. She pushed herself up all the way, forcing her entire weight onto her left foot. She had two options that she could see: first, she could hop on one foot to the bathroom, or she could see if she could straighten her right leg enough for her right foot to rest on the ground. If she could get that far, she figured, she could limp over to the bathroom. But the pain that would involve was just too great, and she reasoned that she could try to straighten her knee after she’d taken the Advil. So, hopping it was.
She felt ridiculous hopping to her bathroom. She was a grown woman in her own house hopping around like a three-year-old. She could almost pretend that she was just hopping on one foot to amuse herself if her right knee weren’t still throbbing. Apparently the jarring from the hopping also hurt it, and with each hop, her knee was pierced with pain.
She made it to her bedroom before the pain overtook her. As she was passing her bed, the jarring pain distracting her, her left ankle twisted just a little as she landed from a hop. Yelping, she allowed herself to fall into her bed, beaten. The tears came before she could stop them, running hot down her face. Her fists clenched at her sides as sobs escaped her lips. She buried her face into her comforter, hoping that it would magically heal her. What the hell was going on, anyways? What had she possibly done to her body to make it scorn her like this?
She didn't want to move. God help her, but she was actually scared of trying to move again. Crushed by her own weight, her right knee was beginning to throb even more painfully. To top it all off, the icing on the cake, was that her left ankle was starting to throb, too. She arched her head down to look at her left ankle, glaring at it. Like her right knee so many hours ago (it must have been hours by now), her left ankle throbbed the most when she tried to move it. How, she wondered angrily to herself, was she supposed to make it to the bathroom without moving her right knee and her left ankle?
The answer was brutally obvious: she couldn't. It was impossible to get to the bathroom without using, at the very least, one of those two joints. Somehow the motion she'd been avoiding had become her only option: she must find a way to stand on her right leg. Hopping on one foot was fine when her left leg was fully functional, but she didn't trust her balance enough to want to test jumping without moving her ankle. (Was that even possible anyways?)
So moving her right knee it was. The decision was made; her knee would now stop protesting and start moving. Right. She rolled over onto her back carefully and then sat up. Her knee was still throbbing, but the pain was lessened now that it hadn't been moved for a couple of minutes. She wished she could make herself believe that the pain wouldn't return, but the pulsating pain denied her that delusion. She scooted herself over to the edge of the bed, hanging her legs off the side. Her left knee bent automatically, but her right knee hung frozen midair, partially bent.
A surge of determination mixed with foolishness washed over her as she slid out of bed, forcing herself to stand on both feet. Her knee straightened itself angrily, but it did straighten, and she was surprisingly grateful for that. The situation was beginning to get desperate as her need to use the bathroom had steadily increased. She was starting to wonder if she'd make it to the bathroom on time. The thought of urinating on herself jarred her into motion before she realized it. Her right leg moved forward, forcing both her right knee and left ankle to bend. The pain ricocheted through her, but she would not stop for it any longer. She had to make it to the bathroom, and she had to do it quickly. The time for games was over. She was going to regain control over her own body.
With each step, both her pain and her determination grew. The bathroom door looming closer to her; she began to reach out hear arms in anticipation. The pain was beginning to overwhelm her. Tears streamed down her face, obscuring her sight. She tasted the saltiness of her tears before she realized she'd been moaning in pain. She could no longer tell whether it was her tears blinding her or the pain, but everything was now blurry. The white bathroom door shimmered in front of her like it was an outward display of her pain. Everything turned to pain; she could no longer feel anything else. She thought vainly of giving up, but she was now closer to the bathroom than to her bed, and she doubted she'd be able to get up if she allowed herself to slump down onto the floor.
The vain hope of the pain ending suddenly and magically sustained her through her final steps as she touched the bathroom door, turned the doorknob, and pushed it open.