Pain rests in my head like a hot bullet, stuck in the gray matter and burning. Nausea surges in tidal waves from throat to stomach and back. I’m here, like I’m supposed to be, looking at the green and brown. I’m focusing on making legible letters. The one ripening tomato looks like a heart, in the center of a green network of veins. And I don’t care. Each cool push of the breeze makes my fingers tighten around the pen and I press a little harder into the paper. My schedules and routines, the ones that make the day work, make life happen, are all derailed. Sent crashing off the track by pain, just like always. Those two green sentinels in my shabby garden are more driven than I. If they feel the bites or their juices being sucked from their living bodies or the burning, they don’t show it. They just grow and produce. Right now I hate them. Their misfortunes and mine both out of our control, I will spend the day in feckless solitude with an ice pack and bitterness, and they will grow tomatoes.