Put your Burger brain back in its bun.

i have often wondered this, bc it threw me off enormously as a child, bc the rivers I had personal experience with were the Huron river in Michigan and the Soque river here in north Georgia, pictured:

And I was thus utterly baffled by stories where rivers were these massive and incredibly dangerous things that were impossible to ford. I was always like... like, I believe you, but I have no way of envisioning this based on the rivers I have met.

Now as an adult, the largest river I've met personally is the Colorado, which is indeed a different scale than the ones I'm more personally acquainted with, but also I have now seen footage of, for example, the fucking Yellow river:

Like, I realize that there's nothing I can say that will help you bridge the empathy divide between us. I realize that, as Elaine Scarry wrote, "To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt."

But holy shit when you are really hurting, it is hard to really be anything else. The pain consumes both body and self. The answer to how are you is in pain, and the answer to what do you want to do today is have less pain, and the answer to what are your plans for the weekend is to lie supine in a vain attempt to relieve the pain.

Relief, which is a lovely word, becomes more and more the only thing I want. I don't want to be successful or win the lottery or have a million people read my new book; I only want relief. I want to be returned to the state that the rest of the world appears to be in, a world where you can care about this and about that instead of being forced only to care about the pain.