我急匆匆地回家拿了行李。露西开车送我去了机场，告诉我她安排了婚姻咨询师。
I rushed home to grab my bags. Lucy drove me to the airport and told me she had scheduled us into couples therapy.

在登机口，我给她发了一条短信：“真希望有你和我一起。”
From the gate, I sent her a text message: “I wish you were here.”

几分钟后，她回了短信：“我爱你。你回来的时候，我会在这里。”
A few minutes later, the response came back: “I love you. I will be here when you get back.”

飞行途中，我的背部感觉非常僵硬。等我终于来到纽约中央车站，赶火车去北部我朋友家时，全身都已经痛得不行了。过去几个月，我有过不同程度的背部痉挛，从可以忽略的小疼痛，到痛得我咬着牙说不出话来，再到痛得蜷缩在地上尖叫。这次的痛比较接近最痛的那种。我躺在候车室一张硬邦邦的长椅上，感觉背部肌肉全都扭曲了。我开始深呼吸，试图控制疼痛，反正现在布洛芬也救不了我了。然后每感觉到一块肌肉抽搐，我就背出它的名字，好把眼泪忍回去：竖脊肌、菱形肌、背阔肌、梨状肌……
My back stiffened terribly during the flight, and by the time I made it to Grand Central to catch a train to my friends’ place upstate, my body was rippling with pain. Over the past few months, I’d had back spasms of varying ferocity, from simple ignorable pain, to pain that made me forsake speech to grind my teeth, to pain so severe I curled up on the floor, screaming. This pain was toward the more severe end of the spectrum. I lay down on a hard bench in the waiting area, feeling my back muscles contort, breathing to control the pain—the ibuprofen wasn’t touching this—and naming each muscle as it spasmed to stave off tears: erector spinae, rhomboid, latissimus, piriformis. . .