everyone should know that i sprained my ankle

Maybe if I didn’t write everything with the weight of consecrating mankind with some brand-new revelation, I wouldn’t have been staring at this blank page for so long. I’ve written thousands of words before and I’ll probably write thousands more, so this particular piece doesn’t even matter that much. Yet, sitting with a nebulous blob of ideas in my lap, trying to distill and condense it into a few pages comes as a heavy task every time. Some people are scared of big things like the ocean or the desert, but the grand scale of things is almost always easier to deal with than trying to figure out a smaller serving. Yesterday, I was walking with sandals on when a little pebble slipped inside. I had probably kicked it up and it landed there without me noticing, and when I put my foot down for the next step, it hurt like hell. I thought I was going to bleed out on the street, so I checked my sole, only to see that it was barely scathed. It was still crazy how much it hurt because at times I like going barefoot on gravel, and the spread of all the little stones under my feet feel like a foot massage. But it somehow took only one singular stone to take me down, which illustrates my suspicion about humans having a complicated relationship with smaller instances of big things — I think this is rarely ever talked about.

When someone is passionate about a particular social issue, suddenly everyone else has a problem with all the other issues the person hasn’t dignified with an action yet. You see someone using a reusable straw, and everyone around them has a whataboutism stroke: what about plastic bags killing sea turtles, fossil fuels running out, or billionaires not paying taxes? What’s one metal straw going to do for the planet, everyone yells, when you’re just trying to enjoy your milkshake with a shiny metal straw. Whatever happened to just being quiet and doing your part? This wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t sweat the little things so much. However, I also can’t be certain if this can be considered a flaw of human nature, because without an eye for small things, there wouldn’t be any joy in taking a stroll and smelling the rain or in hearing water lapping by the lake or in the little things of your loved ones. Or worse, there also wouldn’t be that One Direction song. This is again very complicated, and I’m probably going in circles, but if anyone ever wrote “you never want to know how much you weight, you still have to squeeze into your jeans,” I wouldn’t know how to feel about that.

I was watching a movie a few weeks ago where the protagonist becomes obsessed with caring for an injured pigeon after she rescues it. Lizzy starts carrying the bandaged bird around with her in a shoe box, and her coworkers make fun of her for spending a hundred and fifty dollars at the vet to have it checked up. When she looks unhappy with the vet’s unenthusiastic diagnosis, even the doctor says, “it’s a pigeon.” I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if I wasn’t by myself in the theater, but there was a divide in the audience: evil people who were laughing at her for bending over backwards for a pigeon, which I can honestly understand because she was a struggling artist with deadlines, and this other mentally unstable group in the audience who championed Lizzy for sparing compassion for something that could’ve been easily overlooked, so insignificant. There is something very biblical about this story, because even the flightless pigeon that would’ve been crushed by a car if left outside, the screenwriters seem to argue, stands amongst God’s choir, and deserves the same care and compassion that we pray unto ourselves. On the other hand, I feel like overlooking the smaller and weaker beings is probably a sentiment born out of modern capitalism, which only works if we focus primarily on amassing our own infinite strength and vigor. 

Earlier I called the children of capitalism in the audience evil in reference to the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead’s understanding of the first sign of civilization, which she says is a healed human femur — the long bone that connects the hip to the knee. In the wild, anything with a broken femur would be abandoned and swallowed up by natural processes in due time. “In the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.” But the ability to empathize is what probably sets humans apart from the savage arena. “Broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.” So, it seems that the currently popular sentiment that “you don’t owe anyone anything” is the reductive enemy of humanity, and it makes sense that its being popularized now in tandem with rising neoliberal consciousness.

When I was younger, a child maybe, my mother was always sick. She was always in bed, and when she wasn’t, she was nagging everyone to let her go back to bed. When she was in bed, she wanted everyone to know that she was in bed and where it hurt. I had had enough of her before I was old enough to be able to feel a migraine myself, and I couldn’t have concealed my annoyance with her groaning even if I tried to. So, I grew up to be a man of unfathomable resilience: when I was 13 or 14, I wouldn’t tell anyone if I sprained my ankle. It’ll get better and I’ll spare everyone the burden of concern. I am still the same man, except I’m starting to wonder if I had been lying to myself this whole time by remembering a different inception of my personhood. I sprained my ankle two weeks ago and I tried not to tell anybody, but it just kept popping up in conversations. When I didn’t have a sprained ankle, I could have conversations with ease without ever bringing up my ankle. Suddenly, it seemed, my ankle wants to draw attention to itself, even though I knew the pain was barely anything and it’s best if I get over this without anybody knowing. But my ankle was making me talk, like a ventriloquist’s puppet with a mind of its own, as if there was an untapped reservoir of healing powers in the public consciousness. Every “how’s your ankle now?” was received like a video game health upgrade. But I have to reiterate that I was against all of this, and I would’ve been better off if nobody had found out about my ankle.

My Airbnb host in France is an old lady, a retired professor from Philadelphia, who lives with her son in this house in a middle of nowhere village. She’s great company, and I like staying up with her to watch movies in her living room. Her son is probably my father’s age or older, and he’s been married twice but is now divorced and lives here. The first time I met him, he told me in the first ten minutes that he was autistic, as a way of justifying himself. Sometime later, over lunch, he told me he takes medication that he doesn’t really find useful, but people around him tell him that it really makes a difference to his personality. One time when he was trying to make a Donald Trump joke in front of me, his mother told him to take his pills. She said his orangutan reference didn’t really make sense. “No one knows what you’re talking about.” Once when I asked if they were busy, they both said no, so I asked if they wanted to watch a movie with me. My host asked me to put it on the TV, and suddenly her son had the idea of offering her ice cream. While I’m trying to connect my laptop to the TV and she’s translating the French instructions for me, her son is holding out the tub of Ben and Jerry’s for her. “None for me,” she replies a minute too late. When I finally get the movie to play, he says he’s going to his room to make some art. When I had first walked in to the living room and asked to join them, however, he was really happy about it. “She enjoys your company more than mine.”

            The truth is, I think, everyone wants to be loved so bad, that old people wilt away before your eyes when their lifelong partner passes away. If someone has an accident and becomes wheelchair bound, and they can’t love like they used to, suddenly they start showing an affinity for the gravitational pull near the top of a staircase or stop eating or go to Switzerland for a legal lethal injection. The desire to love and be loved is so strong that people read letters exchanged by lovers hundreds of years ago, so they can learn to be better lovers themselves. “You are the knife I turn inside myself,” Franz Kafka had written to a married woman. In places where this quote appears, there’s usually no other context. But the picture of a knife, with its power to sustain or discard life, is for most people appropriate for carrying the charge of love. They read this and are assured of the love they are capable of giving. People don’t read anything other than declarations of love like this. No one reads Descartes out of context and feels the same pang: “I think, therefore I am.” Most people aren’t that stirred. Understandably, the study and exercise of love takes precedence. If civilization starts at love, it makes sense to have giving and receiving love hardwired in our brains. Some people might want love in secret, but whether they express that desire doesn’t change anything. They still want a place in someone’s heart in a way you own an armchair in a home you’ve spent your whole life. When you want to stop a nuclear reaction, you dip these control rods in the reactor, which absorb the neutrons needed for the reaction to go on. If life inspired science, and birds gave us the idea for planes, human hearts might have something to do with nuclear reactions.