It hurts when I touch it

“I just bumped it,” I say out loud to no one in particular. “I’m sure it will be fine in the morning.”

If the body could speak, mine would surely be dressing me down for thinking so stupid a thing, despite all evidence to the contrary. The body can’t speak, though, so my foot is communicating as best it knows how, which is pain.

I can understand the broad conversational texture of pain, but I’m by no means fluent, so I get an x-ray to interpret the manic screaming coming from the general area of my right big toe, which at this point is scorching hot and pulsating red. “Well, it’s morning now,” the x-ray tells me. “And you are far from fine, you moron.”

Walk Among Us, the Misfits’ debut album, is a medley of playfully interpreted horror scenes. It provides perfect accompaniment as I detail to my buddy T how I tragically fractured my sesamoid bone.

T is overwhelmed by work, his partner in a two-man enterprise having left the country for family reasons, and I agreed to help him put together some products for shipping. We’ve set up shop in my tiny living room, stacked some records to maintain the mood for an all-nighter, and set about assembling one thousand (!) pin badges quickly enough so he can make the last train home.

“So it’s a load-bearing bone, which means I don’t have any problems moving it, but any weight on the fractured side and I collapse like a popped bubble.”

Between the two of us, it takes about five hours to finish the pin badges — T wins, with 570 badges to my 430, which goes to show you that experience truly is the best teacher. I’m happy to help him — he being such a good friend — but I have to wonder if he wouldn’t have finished sooner without me.

After we wrap up, T helps me make my way down the stairs so that I can see him out the door with about 30 minutes to spare before the last train. As I limp my way back up and get ready for bed, I think about the value of good company.

“Did it hurt?” U asks, gesturing with his chin not toward my shattered foot under the table but at the tattoo on my right forearm.

It’s a Tuesday night, unseasonably warm for December. We’re in a gastro pub in Shinjuku, two sore thumbs in a sea of office workers.

“Not really,” I say and make a performance of giving the question some thought, the way a person does in pub conversations. “Well, not any more than it’s supposed to, I guess.”

It’s an act of self-harm, cutting the flesh and burying ink into the scar tissue. If pain weren’t a feature of the ritual, I suspect tattoos would have been replaced at this point by a less “stabby” kind of body art.

Each of my tattoos has its own unique and specific emotional and artistic significance, and each hurt in its own specific way. The tattoo U is asking about now represents a far-off dream of mine. It’s a constant reminder of the vast distance between where I am and where I want to be. The pain that accompanies that reality — a pain I liken to feeling lost and wandering — is a powerful motivator for me.

Having such a visible tattoo in so exposed an area invites this conversation often, and these conversations mostly go the same way in Japan. It didn’t hurt, I say. I’d like to get one too, the other person says, and we move on to the next subject. This conversation provided another data point to support that tendency.

After drinks, U says he needs a smoke. I join him in designated smoking area outside the pub, ask him what it’s like to need something like that.

“It’s like sitting still for a long time,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke in the direction of a messy Shinjuku alleyway. “You just feel like, I have to move.”

T’s text arrives just as I’m leaving the office for lunch. “Is it working?” he asks about the prescription insole I picked up from the hospital a few days ago.

I tell him that my toe feels better, that it only hurts when I touch it. “I’m getting stir crazy from the lack of exercise”, I tell him. “It feels like some kind of punishment.”

I have been working the hangboards at the gym trying to preserve my grip strength in preparation for the day that I can cram my feet back into climbing shoes. When? In a month? In three?

You just feel like, I have to move. I parrot the thought in my head and trace my fingers over the tattoo on my right forearm.