I try not to complain too much on here — at least about anything other than my relationships with women. But in the current moment, my experience is dominated by my knees.
I just walked about 50 yards from my house to a bike share. For the last couple of years, most days, I’ve biked to and from work. This has been great, as I love the intimacy with topography that biking brings, in comparison to other modes of more or less rapid transit. There’s a second benefit of which I’ve been mostly unconscious: in the last several years, walking has become increasingly difficult for me.
Initially, I didn’t make anything of it. I didn’t think too much about the fact that I had an infinite preference for biking over walking, and that walking was becoming increasingly fatiguing for me, and painful. I knew it, but I didn’t know it. Until, really in the last 18 months, it became undeniable. My knees simply render impossible the experience of walking without the accompanying experience of agony.
I’m not a big taker of drugs. And so, for the most part, I’ve simply borne the pain and titrated my walking. But a few months ago, I finally brought myself to a round of doctors to investigate. And of course, what they found was no surprise. Whatever cartilage there once was in my knees is long gone. I have a torn meniscus in each knee. And I am what my generally surgery-hostile physiatrist referred to as a surgeon’s dream.
So here I am, stumbling slowly toward partial knee replacements — two of them. The first to come in just under four weeks, and the second three months or so after that.
In a moment when I was already feeling a bit depressed about aging, about mortality, about my seemingly diminished sexual viability, this is all a bit of a blow. I keep telling myself that a year from now, I’ll be in a very different place — able once again to walk without wincing at each step, able to contemplate a hike not as an act of violence inflicted on me by my companions, but as a genuinely enjoyable way of spending a couple of hours, and being intimate with the topography.
For now, though, as I ride on my bike — the bike providing the only relief my knees get as they go up and down without impact — the tears in my eyes from my walk just a few minutes ago stream out the corners and down my cheeks.
Featured image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, late afternoon in autumn, flat grey-white sky diffusing cold light without shadow. A city bike-share dock on a cracked concrete sidewalk, three or four blue bikes locked into it, their handlebars catching a thin gleam. The camera is low — knee height — looking up the length of a man’s leg from just below the waist: dark trousers, worn leather shoe planted on the concrete, the posture of someone who has just arrived and stopped. The dock is sharp; the leg above it softens to blur. The concrete is wet from recent rain, the bikes’ chrome streaked with it, and from one handlebar a single bead of water is caught mid-fall, impossibly bright against the grey.
Bottom image prompt (gemini): Narrow urban side street at dusk, no people, shot at ground level looking up a cracked asphalt path toward a single bike share dock under a sodium-vapor lamp. A bicycle leans in its slot, backlit so its frame catches a thin corona of amber. The foreground is dominated by wet pavement reflecting the lamp in a long smeared streak of gold. The street is empty in both directions. A low fog or mist softens the far end. The color palette is bruised blue-grey with one wrong note of burnt orange from the lamp. The mood is exhaustion held together by small forward motion — a place that asks nothing of a body except to stop.