My Willowdale Place Journal

I remember clutching the steering wheel in the Costco Vaughan lot, the sun glaring off the SUV beside me, and thinking, this is ridiculous. My knee had been swollen and awkward for months after the arthroscopy, but that morning it felt like someone had stuffed wet cotton in it. I sat there, doors open, sweating in my work shirt, and texted my wife a selfie of my stupid face with the caption: "mildly inconvenienced." She replied, "I told you to call someone weeks ago." Th

I was halfway through peeling the sticker off a fresh Tim Hortons cup when I felt it, a dull pressure behind my knee that made me stop. It was weird timing, the little moment in the morning where you realize something is off. I had been walking funny for weeks, the limp subtle enough to hide from myself but obvious to my wife when I shuffled past the kitchen. The day before, the Costco parking lot had been the place where the limp finally felt like a thing you could not ign

I was halfway through ordering my usual double-double at the Tim Hortons on Bramalea Road when I felt it — a soft, puckered tightness behind my right knee that shouldn't have been there. I looked down. The joint was puffed a bit, just under the patella, like someone had stuffed a small orange into my knee sock. I waved off the barista's "anything else?" And walked to the car trying to act casual, which is a bad look when you're fifty percent sure people can see the swelling