I’ve wanted to say for weeks now that there was a day, while teaching, that I lost my legs, and I completed my seminar with the podium in a death grip to spare myself the added pain, and shame, of falling. That day, I wanted to write that I shuffled like an infant or a drunk down and up subway stairs, because cabs are a luxury reserved for real emergencies and I already felt guilty for even wanting to use it. That day, I was in too much pain to write, but as I stumbled towards my apartment, pausing to rest on strangers’ stoops, a man stepped in my face and tried to take my elbow, saying, “Hey, baby, you look like you need help, let me walk you home.” I said no. He followed me for 4 blocks, insisting, laughing, “Let a real man take you home.” I’m sure he thought I was drunk. Uninhibited. Easy pickings. When the truth is, I couldn’t run. It’s the recurring nightmare I have, playing out in real time, that when they come for me I will have nothing left, not energy, not physical ability, to protect myself, not from street abduction, home invasion, assault, robbery, rape.

To think this is called running out of spoons.

The flare-up, like all flare-ups, is gone now. I haven’t bothered to say anything to a doctor because experience has taught me how they’ll read it as acute pain, an isolated episode, because I’m all better now, I’m not army crawling through my apartment, and my body is already forgetting it the way we shed winter’s mortal cold when faced with summer sun (Morris, 1998). In the cold and bright rooms of the hospital wards they tell me the story of my pain in quantified measure, evacuating it of meaning (Morris, 1991). So there I linger, at 145th Street, at Deleuze’s convergence of critical and clinical as an opportunity for mutual learning, at a free clinic where I stand out as too rich and not sick enough, alienated from everything and myself (Malabou, 2012), waiting for the threat to pass, waiting to be thrown out on my ass to face it, because only the thin line where earth meets sky is where the wastebasket diagnoses, like me, belong (Bowker & Star, 1999).