THE CHANGE

I know this pain, she wrote in her journal. Some pains are just like songs. You hear the song, or feel the pain and you are transported back to a time you knew long ago when the song or the pain was woven inextricably into your life.

She had been feeling not quite right for days but thought it might be a touch of flu that was going around. The pain occurred almost always after using her new exercise equipment, or if she rushed up stairs or walked very fast. This fact was not clear to her until she checked the chart she kept at her doctor’s request.

I don’t think it’s fair, she wrote, that perimenopause can make you relive the pain of your youth. It ought to be different somehow. Why should a woman of 50 plus have to feel again the pain she felt at 12 or 22?

What happened in her youth should stay there, in the past, not revisit the present when there are fewer days left to bury the memories.

Not fair she wrote. Not fair. Though I know fairness is not a promise life can offer, I’ve never quite been able to give up hoping. Well, here’s another lesson I guess. Don’t expect fair play from genes. 

So, she reasoned, convincing herself of a kind of fairness. A vision which finally bestowed unearned grace upon what could not be changed overlaying what she in her youth labeled “The Thing,” making its ending seem a bit of poetry.