music is love

this seems weirdly enthusiastic - to make my way to the other side of town on my first night with crutches. It's about clinging stubbornly to an identity I've made for myself in London, that I could get on stage and read a poem and ok. The most terrifying thing - made far more terrifying by walking on sticks. It's enough just to get on stage and I mess up a bit.

Worth it to hear all the other poems and above that to hear the music - a  scandinavian singer I haven't heard before and songs I have heard before which are always beautiful.

Then everything falls apart a bit. My resolve to be independent dissolves when I'm offered help but it all feels too much. As if I've intruded on people too much. Made myself so high profile that I won't be able to go back until my foot has healed.

On the other hand this is enough beauty to store up against the days ahead.

Vulnerable ...

...in two senses. Every 'step' is an opportunity to fall over, every jolt of the bus as I find my seat a potential further fracture. I am also laid wide open, ultra visible for people to make assumptions or ask direct questions. I haven't yet mastered the art of crutching and talking at the same time. 

Mostly I experience how kind people are. This is London. The busy intersection of Warren St and Euston Rd - a young woman stops me and adjusts my crutches. We take the bus together. The common response to broken limbs, hobbling on crutches, undiagnosed injuries is to laugh before sympathizing. Jocularity at the prat fall. That is the only reasonable reaction, to an experience so emotional it must be dismissed by laughter. The young woman's eyes glint with tears as she tells me about her own experiences as a pre-pubescent - a year on crutches with a damaged hip. Her life still divided into before and after. I remember that a lot of writers had similiar experiences of being withdrawn from the world for part of their early years. Roald Dahl I mention, perhaps inaccurately. Roald Dahl wrote cool stories, we agree.

Grounded

Broken ankle misdiagnosed as gnat bite. That's my condition. I've been walking, driving dancing for seven weeks with a broken bone in my foot. Today I got my cast and crutches and that's the subject of my blog. It was going to be about going out in London. Perhaps foolishly I am going to go out, the first evening I have my crutches. I put a blue sock over my exposed toes and dressed in a jacket and earrings to match, a move away from my usual bag lady style, knowing this will help. I'll need all the help I can get.