Life 2

A commercial for hair re-growth, or perhaps it was hair removal, greets my return. I shift in my chair, away from the television, and find that my leg has gone numb. Numbness has a strange way of seeping into our awareness: its presence is an absence. Its sole gift an uncanny awareness that what should be is not. The numbness I feel in my leg is simple enough. But the numbness I feel when I look around this room is something different, something else. It’s as though I’m waiting for that piercing sensation, that feeling of blood rushing back to its neglected passageways. Waiting for the assurance that the feeling will return, grateful even for the pain. But nothing ever comes. Nothing ever has come. I shake my leg to hurry the return of the familiar. But I was born into numbness, and my body shakes for the return of something it’s never known.