I’m not as flexible as I probably should be. If I twist my arm around to grab something behind me, I can feel my shoulder joint resist the motion. It doesn’t want to move that way, and it lets me know. It beams pain signals into my central nervous system. I can feel the ache for minutes afterwards.
The pain’s coming from bone, or from cartilage, or from joint fluid, or something. I can’t remember shit about the anatomy of the shoulder, even though I had to memorize it once: every structure, every name. That’s all anatomy is: names. It’s fucking bullshit, let me tell you.
My muscles are so weak that I don’t know how I can stand, or how I can move. It shouldn’t be possible. Every day I feel weird flashes of arbitrary and inexplicable pain in my joints, in areas of mechanical stress. My feet ache, my arms ache, my neck aches, my back aches.
I have the kind of weak and skeletal body that it’s only been possible to have for maybe the last fifty years. I have never had to do any kind of hard labor. I never have to walk out in the cold for more than twenty seconds at a time.
My “modern,” “middle-class lifestyle” has allowed me to survive for twenty-one years. This makes me feel like a fraud. I wouldn’t have made it this far if I’d been born just a hundred years ago. I would have starved or frozen to death. I would have broken a leg. I would have died of tuberculosis. Something like that. I should not really be here.
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