Pneumotholstice

One cold morning as the winter solstice neared, I woke up with a collapsed lung. This didn't seem very fair as I'd already had my completely random, debilitating injury for 2025 back in January when my ankle stopped working for no reason.

Apparently it's common for spontaneous collapsed lungs to affect tall men. It does seem particularly egregious though - when I go to sleep buffered by at least four pillows - to wake up with new injuries.

I did go to hospital about my collapsed lung a couple of days after the solstice after spending a week thinking it was some kind of weird covid that only affected one lung and didn't show up on RATs. The doctor checked out my X-ray and suggested a conservative approach as opposed to admitting me to stick a needle into my chest cavity and suck out the excess air. The conservative approach was appealing to me too. So since then I've had a couple more X-rays to see if it is getting worse or better.

According to the latest X-ray it is getting better. Could this collapsed lung be a metaphor for winter? The day with the shortest amount of lung, and then slowly but surely it expands each day and eventually there's a summer of massive, never-ending lung? And then after New Year's the roulette wheel spins again to determine what my journal entries will be about in 2026?

No, probably not. If it's a metaphor for anything (it's not) it's a metaphor for the collapse of metaphors. It's dark. I'm cold. I'm growing old. I'm not running out of visual imagery, I'm running out of novel feelings to allude to with them.

But at least the solstice is done with. Soon it will be sprung.