1.
Physical pain is a real pain. Emotional pain is close to it. At the slightest opportunity I like to toy with unreal worries and thought experiments - out of my everyday realm, almost unthinkable. But it turns out that, joyfully enough, I may be able to think about anything. Not that my thoughts are any good for that matter, but that's alright with me: I can spend endless hours dreaming the whole world outside in my mind. And I can do that at any speed and rate and in any place and at any time of the year. Thoughts just come without even calling out their names. Freely flowing from some unknown source, the back of my mind or the tip of my leftmost toe, nevermind. I'm very capable of that and much more than that - I'm skilled at caring about everything, I have a natural gift for pondering and reasoning: from the utterly insignificant - mostly - to the undoubtedly important. I do that, when I am sound.
Being in Paris with a persistent toothache is anything but fun.
2.
The only good thing about pain is the gratifying feeling of joy it brings as soon as it disappears. Not that it has completely vanished, no. I have simply been able to bring it into a hibernating state by gulping a pair of Nurofen tablets down my throat. A poor man's remedy. A poor man. Period. But effective, though, largely improving my wretched condition. A side-effect is an enhanced dullness - as if the usual level were not high enough - accompanied by torpid movements. That's how things stand on the verge of walking my steps toward the train station. The nuisance from the unpleasant pain is over, for the time being, rapidly taken over by the mild inconvenience of feeling sedated, or - as a humble dedication - by the unlikely fact of having become comfortably numb, so to speak.
Night has fallen, the lake down the road is still frozen and the ugly tower in the distance keeps reminding me I'm in Paris. My short-term future is as ugly as the tower, with my mouth wide open to the merciless performance of the dentist.
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