My Collection

It’s snowing. Again. My head is pounding. Again. Today I feel as if neither of these will ever go away. Winter has been endless just as my pain is endless. Here’s the thing, though. I am confident that nature will do what it always does: get warmer so the snow will melt, enable trees and flowers to grow, and cause humans to feel a sense of renewal. Some humans, that is. I’ll just be sitting here with my unique collection, looking toward another type of springtime that may never come.

I collect pain like young boys and girls once collected stamps, carefully placing them into little compartments in a handy binder for future reference. They traded these treasures, bought and sold them, saved them for the future when they might be worth more. I have no choice but to hold on to my collection: no trading or selling for me. No one wants what I have to offer.

There’s my 1976 migraine, still in circulation. I have a feeling I’ll be keeping that one. The 1991 gallbladder was discarded and is no longer in use. The 1999 fibromyalgia is a good one: I obtained it, sold it several years later, then acquired it once more. That’s apparently another keeper. Sometime in the 1990s I also bought constant stomachaches and nausea; I traded those for some Prilosec. My most expensive acquisition, the one that has caused the most suffering, is my neck pain and chronic headache, issued in 2007. I’ve been working on selling that pair for 11 years, but no one has offered me the right price. I’ve been offered physical therapy, acupuncture, a pharmacy’s worth of medications, and I still have that pair in my collection. And strangely enough, they have not faded with time. The colors are as bright, and the edges as crisp, as the day I first got held them in my hands and said I couldn’t afford them. Yet here they are, 11 years later, still the most expensive pieces of my collection. The ones I try to sell to all of the people in white coats. The ones that keep me in constant winter, covered in a layer of snow that never leaves me.

Yup, some humans will indeed feel renewed when spring finally arrives. As for me, I’ll just work on reorganizing my collection. I really need to sell the whole thing off. Any buyers out there?