First, I noticed it after a long run. I’d taken a shower and I was sitting in my reading chair, drinking hot chocolate while surfing the web. The table is on my left, so I pick the cup up and set it down with my left hand. Halfway between the table and my mouth, ever so slightly, I feel it. A little pulse down the arm. I put the cup down just a little less smoothly than I used to.
I read this can happen, especially after workouts. Nothing hurts.
Then, one night, drinking a nice Spanish red, I lower the glass to the table and I see it. I watch my hand shake a bit with the weight of the glass. I take another sip; it happens again. I haven’t run in two days.
I’ve had brain scans and workups, so I believe it’s nothing. I’m nearing 50 and surely this is the just the entrance fee for the gift of being allowed to live this long. In high school, freshman year, the boy I took to Sadie Hawkins was killed by a drunk driver. A few years later, a classmate died. Friends have died in freak accidents and from bone-breaking cancers. Some have taken their own lives.
So if I have a little tremor, I’m lucky. If I spoon sugar into my coffee as my head shakes a bit and my hand quivers, the way my great-aunt Nanan did, then I’m in good company.
Perhaps my body wants to say enough, enough of these orders from central command. We have been too regulated for too long. We are the libertarians of limbs, free to make our own movements and suffer the consequences ourselves.
I can only stay in control for so long. I can only hold it together so many years. I can do so much, but only so much. If my left arm has decided there is more to do, that it can no longer idle by and tolerate the cohesion of this life, then go. Let that tremor lead you to great things. Unwind all these years and untwist all these days.
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