A true story about pain, insomnia and love

My wrist is on fire. Writing through the pain to keep from going insane, I was reminded of another week in my past when physical pain called the shots. I was eighteen, hovering in the limbo between graduating highschool and being drafted to the army. My thoughts were pretty much nowhere. I don’t recall contemplating my immediate future or trying to wrap my head around the chapter of my life that had just ended.

I lived like a vampire, sleeping in until five or six in the evening and opening my window only when I was sure I would find the night outside. My friends and I watched the sun rise every morning and then hobbled off to our beds, content in turning our backs on the world. The emptiness was almost complete, were it not for the fact that I still constantly thought of her; the one girl I had stared at for the entire four years of highschool. Thinking about her and how I’d never see her again was the only thing that had any effect on my stomach.

My mother feared the army much more than I did. Believing, not altogether mistakenly, that I would disappear into it for three years without ever showing my head again, she insisted that I get my life in order before I was gone. The most urgent item on her list was for me to undergo oral surgery and have my wisdom teeth removed, so that they wouldn’t push up through my gums and ruin years of arduous and expensive orthodontic work. Had I known then what the army was about to be like I would have never gone through with the operation; as a soldier there was nothing I wanted more than a reason to take medical leave of my base. I would have gladly volunteered for any procedure, no matter how superfluous. Unfortunately, in my pre-military naïveté and apathy, I lazily went along with my mother’s ideas.

Much as the army would later bring the sky down on me on that first freezing desert night, I only realized what I had gotten into once the doctor was hunched over me and I could see my bloody mouth reflecting all too clearly in his glasses. True to his promise, I felt no pain – only pressure, but that pressure was awfully painful. Once the operation was over I was given a whole mess of painkillers and sent on my miserable way.

Fearing pain as much as I do, I took the pills religiously. I held a bag of frozen broccoli up to my cheeks in a preemptive strike, determined to feel nothing. It worked, I felt fine. By the time I’d fallen asleep that night, I’d allowed myself to feel relieved. The pills worked.

The next morning I awoke to horrible, sharp stomach pains that had me doubling over and falling out of bed. That initial stabbing marked the beginning of six days of constipation, during which I would spasm in pain every five to ten minutes. For nearly a week I barely ate and barely slept. I couldn’t find a moment’s rest for the first three days. By the fourth day the exhaustion was inhuman. My body scrambled for sleep wherever it could find some, and sustained itself on four to eight minute naps between crunches of pain. I went to doctor after doctor. No one knew what was wrong.

As distorted as it sounds, I began to learn how to live with the pain. These “contractions” I was seized with every five minutes became predictable, reliable. The first one hadn’t killed me, neither had the second. However, coupled with a weeklong bout of insomnia, my mind was slowly unraveling. Diving into romantic, storybook insanity, all I could think of was the girl. Highschool was over, and I would probably never see her again.

In the middle of the fifth sleepless night it was perfectly clear to me: I needed to write her a letter. It was the sleep deprivation that made me forget what I already had enough sense to know by then; that letters are always a mistake. I sat down and wrote what I believe and remember to be the most embarrassing and humiliating composition I’d ever stringed together. I don’t know this for a fact; I have no copies of the letter. There was only one copy. It was a love letter, naturally. A shameful, bitter, naked, slightly insane love letter. I believe one of the lines was “I will die regretting never having seen you naked”. I wish I could be sure that that was the worst of it.

If I had been a little luckier, or had been a little more patient, I might have put the letter away in a desk drawer and later on dispensed of it in private humiliation. But I was crazy with insomnia, and with wide vein-colored eyes I counted the minutes between pain and more pain until the sun rose and the post office opened. What should have been a ten minute walk must have taken me forty five minutes. I shuffled along sidewalks like an old man carrying his IV drop down a hospital corridor, repeatedly pausing through the pain. But I made it. I mailed the letter.

When I returned home from the post office my father was waiting for me, wondering where I was. One of the doctors had called him the other night, and later he’d thought of something: was I still taking the painkillers from my oral surgery? Of course I was, I answered. These stomach pains were torturous enough; I didn’t want to add any more pain onto it.

Apparently constipation and stomach spasms were amongst possible side effects to the painkillers I had been taking throughout the whole ordeal, always on time, never once missing a pill. The irony was delicious: My week of pain had been brought on by painkillers.

If I wanted to find additional aesthetic beauty in the nonsensical turns of life, I might point out that a week of stomach pains finally and forcefully removed that girl from my stomach for good.

She never wrote me back. A few years later I saw her again, we even spoke, but she never mentioned the letter, and I wouldn’t dare bring it up. I sat up one night and thought about it. I wondered what I’d really written in that letter, and why she’d simply swallowed it up and ignored it. I asked a friend “Maybe she never got the letter?” My friend, always a realist, said “Did you write her address on it? Did you write your address? Did you get the letter back? No? Then she got it.”

I think that week we both got it.