Title: The Nerve

My right arm had stopped functioning. I My right arm had gone silent, so I painted this with the hand that still worked, which became its own kind of answer; the body finds a way even when it has every reason not to. This was not a metaphor I chose afterward. It was the exact course of what I felt while I felt it; the nerve pathways painted as they burned, orange and red, exposed, reaching down into water that would not hold still. There was no other way to say it. Pain at that pitch does not translate into sentences, so I translated it into paint instead, in real time, stroke for sensation. What nobody tells you about pain this loud is that it still has an anatomy, even when no scan can find it. This painting gives it one.painted this with my left hand, in pain I could not fully describe. This is what my body felt like from the inside; the spine exposed, the nerve pathways burning orange and red, the inflammation visible, the hand reaching down into a churning sea beneath a storm. I had two operations; one through the front of my neck, one through the back. Before either of them, this is what was happening inside me. What I did not expect was to discover that physical pain, as profound as it was, still felt quieter than the other kind. What do we do with pain that has no visible anatomy?