I’ve been sick. Seriously sick, in the sense of “unable to scratch more than a couple of thoughts together in a row.” Not seriously sick in the sense of “this is going to negatively impact my health in the long term,” thank the heavens, but it’s still been somewhat sobering.

So, I get back pain. I know I’ve mentioned this before, maybe once or twice a year something alongside my spine¹ will start aching. It’s kind of a stress thing; sometimes I can feel it start and if I’m cautious and careful I can generally find a position where it gradually goes away. But there’s that one or two times a year when I’ll wake up early in the morning with a full on pulsing ache that feels like someone’s found a dull kitchen knife and has decided to pry apart the vertebrae midway down my back with it.

This is soul-destroying stuff. I cannot imagine having to deal with it more frequently² than I already do. Not only is it incredibly painful, it’s a Harrison-Bergeron-level of constant distraction which makes it impossible to read or watch TV or do just about anything beyond listen to soothing music and look for some position that might alleviate the pain. Of course, this is in and of itself stressful, and stress makes it worse, so I think it really only passes when the muscles back there fatigue after about six hours.

Now, I travel with medication for this sort of thing. Specifically cyclobenzaprine. It’s not great — it takes about an hour to kick in, and makes me confused and sleepy — so my usual plan when this happens is to pop two of them and hope it cuts enough of the pain that I can fall asleep, then sleep through the worst of it. Typically I’ll wake up in the afternoon, still groggy, with the pain gone and my back sore where it used to hurt. It could be worse.

So the morning I was due to travel from Kotor to Dubrovnik, I woke up around 5am with this thing going full tilt. I popped a couple of cyclobenzaprine pills and spent a horrific couple hours trying to get back to sleep. Somehow, miraculously, the hotel checkout time is noon. After a few fitful naps, my back wasn’t better but appeared to be on the mend, so I grabbed my suitcase and headed for the bus station.

I slept some on the bus, got to Dubrovnik around 3pm, grabbed some snacks and soda from the supermarket, and crashed in my room. I was still kind of out of it, so I just ate the stuff I bought and stayed in to recover. I was asleep by 10pm. And that’s when it all went sideways.

At 2am I woke up with back pain again. This isn’t totally uncommon; when I get it I tend to get it a couple days in a row, although not usually quite as badly. I took another couple muscle relaxants and wandered around my room hoping the pain would fade. I eventually took another pill after an hour,³ and finally fell asleep around 5am. Which, great, I was awake again at noon and pretty much pain free.

Except by now I was dealing with all the side-effects of the muscle relaxants which, again, are confusion and drowsiness. And it was also almost 24 hours since I had eaten anything.⁴ So I kind of killed the afternoon and the evening, still discombobulated until about 9pm, by which time I started to get a headache from the lack of food. And now I was in that bind where it was increasingly too late to run out and find some food, but my headache was getting worse, which also made it difficult to make decisions. And I knew there was breakfast in the hostel at 7am, if I could just get through to then, which I did with the mother of all headaches screaming at me the whole time, and then crashed back in my room to recover from two nights of very intermittent sleep.

All of which is to say, I haven’t actually seen much of Dubrovnik. I made it out in enough time to grab a decent dinner in the city Monday night, but beyond that I’ve only had most of the day to wander around the Old Town. Which is a shame. The Old Town is surprisingly large — easily worth at least a full day of exploring, where most of the ones I’ve visited you could knock out in a brisk afternoon — and the sheer scale of it is delightful.

It’s also filled with a lot of happy tourists. I suppose one can thank Game of Thrones to some extent for the mood around here; there’s no shortage of shops willing to remind you that quite a lot of King’s Landing and the Red Keep were shot in and around the city.⁵ It’s nice to be someplace that feels bursting with life, even in the midday sun, even if the stores are filled with the same jewelry and designer knock-offs and souvenir glassware you can find just about anyplace.

For all the crowds, it’s not crowded exactly. And there’s enough moments of quiet reflection, looking at the art in the Dubrovnik Cathedral or standing on the edge of the harbor looking over the Adriatic, that you can get moments of privacy when you need them. I really want more than a long afternoon to take it all in. And there’s a lot outside of the Old Town to visit. And I won’t see it. Not this trip. That feels heartbreaking.

But I’ve been sick. And that’s okay, too. I know there’s been a lot about self-care and listening to yourself and even as I’m typing this I’m arguing with someone who’s feeling crappy and needs to knock off work early and even hours after resolving to do so hasn’t, yet. We’re not good at cutting ourselves any slack. The Protestant Work Ethic is buried deep in much of Western culture. There’s an ever present fear that we need to prove our worth; we are blessed by working harder, by denying the flesh, by offering our very being up as a sacrifice to the Powers That Be.

Dubrovnik Cathedral has, to me, some of the most moving Stations of the Cross I’ve ever seen. They’re modern, from 2006, and they’re almost abstract mosaics of Jesus bearing the cross to the Crucifixion. The cross is represented by sweeping curved lines across the wooden canvas. Christ is depicted simply; you can make out his beard but no more detail than that to his face. Most Stations of the Cross really pile on the gruesome Passion of the Christ details of blood streaming down Jesus’ face, the nails being driven through the hands, the agony of the Crucifixion. These, instead, are graceful, even elegant. The suffering is understated, you already know the story, no need for the theatrics. Instead there’s just these simple, sad, uplifting images. A few gentle lines, some rough sketches of figures, and most of the canvas suffused with darkness and light.

It’s difficult to acknowledge our mortality. We’re often haunted by the feeling we need to deny it, to seem invulnerable and strong and robust, to fill our Instagrams with grinning selfies where we’re having The Best Time Ever™ or pull unpaid overtime to prove we’re a team player, we have worth, we’ve earned our keep. It’s not true. It was never true. I’m not religious, but if the story of Jesus has anything to teach us, it’s that Christ already died for your sins. You’re under no obligation to do the same. And neither am I.

Next: Zagreb (ZAG) to London (LHR)
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Footnotes

¹ It’s been diagnosed as “arthritis” and given its utter lack of increasing in frequency or intensity over the last 20 years, I’m inclined to believe it’s at least not anything worse.

² Although maybe I’d invest more effort into finding ways to deal with it, if it did.

³ I’ve double checked the maximum recommended dosage on these things, and this was kind of pushing it, but not severely.

⁴ All of the following would have been avoided if I had a travel companion who could have gotten me a sandwich.

⁵ Which, by the way, how long do you think they’ll be able to milk that association now that the show’s off the air? Two years? Five? Ten? Will the spinoffs keep that alive? How many identically stocked officially-licensed merchandise shops does any place really need in an area smaller than the Vatican City?