my foot.

My feet hurt. Like injured soles.

They don’t hurt all the time as you might hear me say now and then. There are moments of relief. Somedays I will wake up and not feel anything in my feet. Bliss.

I’ve been reading Dexter, the first novel. Sometimes I feel like I want to pull apart my feet. Separate the nerves and take the muscle off the bones. Find what’s wrong and fix it. This is assuming that pain isn’t normal, that pain is wrong.

Then I start to wonder how feet that were pulled apart and put back together would function. It’s not lego, is it? Would lego feet hurt?

This doesn’t keep me from walking, however. I try and stretch my feet as I walk, covering the pain points. At least I think I am. Like it’s some kind of massage. It isn’t.

I took the bus to school today. Sounds like I’m in grade school, or lower. But I did. I took the bus. I had to walk 20 minutes from the house to the bus stop, up hill. No joke. Just like all the elders did, back in the day. But I did it in the snow. They didn’t have snow up my family tree.

It was beautiful. Sunday morning. Hovering around zero degrees. Not warm but not cold either. Weatherless. Mostly empty streets. Mostly empty roads. It reminded me of The Road. I like imaging that sometimes. Being in an empty city with everything mostly intact. Its lifelessness. Everything mostly still. Nothing that moves of its own volition but you.

I waited at the bus stop. For a moment, actually, for many moments I thought the bus wouldn’t come. At least not on time. 8:06am the trip planner said. But it was Sunday and this was the first time I was taking the bus to school this early on a Sunday. 8:04am, no sign of the bus down the road. I quickly run to the garbage bin some 35 feet away to throw away my coffee cup. I quickly run back.

8:06am, the bus was there.

How would you know you were the last person on earth?

You wouldn’t know, you’d just be it.