ocean

Walk

Man framed in titanium hefts his hubbed discs. Passes a playground by the geodesic, deltoids straining against curb cuts.
Runs forth a smallish character:

—Why don’t you walk, sayeth the child.
—Well, sayeth the gimp, because—see—(and here for a halfsecond pondering the cherubic face looking up as though holding for him some puzzle piece fit to his lostness) the neck is a bridge. A bridge between the head and the rest of the body. And my bridge got broken. So when my head tells my legs to walk, the message can’t make it across.

Childperson cants its disproportionate head:

—Walk is what people do, declares the juvenile.
—Am I a people?
—Yes.
—But I don’t walk.
—You’re still a people.

Assertions of cherub-sized whippersnapper draw into question human status. Remember walking. Remember the sequence: fall forward, catch, repeat. That sequence which describes ambulation still describes me: balance, lean, catch, shift, lift, push. Again. Less cherubic more gremlin.

—What’s it like? Sayeth the earnest snot-nose.
—What’s what like.
—What does it feel like?
—What does what feel like.
—Being a body like that?

...It feels like eyes. Eyes all over my body. Numbness. And no temperature. A brokenness on the face of the earth. I can’t do what even babies can: dash, climb, dance. Waves of claustrophobic panic when I try to move some part of me that can’t move. I float above ground, intimately jostled by the most minor textures: pebbles, dips, cracks, grades. Hills rolling like the sea. In my dreams I walk, I carry my wheelchair over my shoulder, in my arms like a baby, push or drag it up stairs or through fountains or rainstorms, across city squares, onto trains. Sometimes a scream wakes me.

—Same as yours.
—Well. You’re still a people.