It was only by chance that my unchanging bodily situation acquired a name. A doctor—perhaps in acquiescence to my pleading, but probably not—made a new suggestion: Write down what happened. A short history, listing my symptoms, when pain began, and how it progressed. Write down how you feel each day. We’ll see if it adds up to anything. The instruction was likely a patronizing acquiescence to my clarion distress as opposed to a genuine attempt to obtain information that could be useful for my treatment. Yet, I found the potential gravity of the task comforting: When you point out that something has been taken for granted, it is about to be so no longer. I searched for edges, in order to give what I had gone through some recognizable form so it could be acknowledged, acted upon. How I was then versus now. When did the pain become regular? Has it been a week? A month? A year? The more I thought about when I might have last been healthy, the more a figure of “a self with health” was formed in my mind. My penmanship—which, in the days before the arthritis really took hold, was quite neat—in these entries appears frenzied, trembling, as though every cell in my body were popping with effervescence, irrepressible. The more I wrote down for the doctor, the more pain I found already there in the darkness, outside myself, tenses tangled. I could be fresh, new in each moment of observation. When I wrote about an ache lifting, I was euphoric—the pills must be helping! Reading the notes now, I bore myself. The writing’s relentless self-awareness does not excuse its ragged edges, its intrusive mediocrity. The self-fascination seemingly required to own one’s I is my ultimate reservation: one’s own pain is simply not a tasteful object of contemplation. Yet, the I ideally contains fragments, inconsistencies, that might prove to be fruitful, allow me to exist within the experience, avoid re-narrativizing the past.

The doctor had told me to write down the facts, but the facts . . . weren’t, exactly. My symptoms were as they always were: fever; dizzy all the time; things sound different than usual, echo-y. Each felt like a climax, but only the fever could be turned into data, could transform the unruly events of the body into information. I am trying to cultivate a way of being that will keep me from being swallowed by time spent like this, with no end in sight. Sentence accomplished. But to accept living this way would be a violation of my life. I believed that writing what I experienced—even through some unwritten omission—might bring a useful interpretation to the surface, or that a hidden logic between ostensibly disconnected symptoms and ideas would reveal itself.