On being crip (sometimes not all that hip)

Recently I have been in the Capital and done things that only the Capital can offer for me. I try to make that place my new home in the future, hence I spread my roots there. Make shops, streets and people mine (in the novel I am writing there is a chapter on how to eat a city - if you are ever moving somewhere let me give it to you, it's very useful.) in doing that I try to get to know my future home.

Hence, I used the subway alot. There's a green line, a red line and a blue line. I know alot about the red line, and close to nothing about the green line, this time I tried the blue line since I was staying with someone who lived along it.

It was dreadful. I hate the blue line with a passion so deep I can feel my fingertips hitting the glossy keys of my keypad somewhat furiously. The blue line was very aesthetic - soothingly bluecolored it made me think of the Swedish childrens book Loranga, Mazarin and Dartanjang where one of the characters dwells in an all blue room.

The falsely soothing blue line had lots of elevators, great you say that the Capital provides means of transportation for it's more vulnerable habitants. Hypocracy I say!
In order for a mean of transportation to be useful it must transport its user. The elvators on the ever so soothin (is it a trick, an act to relief tension build up from travelling in such conditions?) blue line did not.

So I climbed, I don't really mind climbing stairs I do it in the comfort of my own home everyday. I only mind climbing them when I know I shouldn't have to. When there has been an opportuinty to move in a more suitable manner, but that opportuntiy is no more.
It's called climbing a stair in this text cause that is what I actually do. I climb the slippery and dirty stairs of the subway up and down, inside and out. My sweaty plams grip the shiny chrome that a thousand hands have gripped before me.
Some of these might have been crooked as my own, hanging on for dear life on to a shiny piece of metal that reflects their hard working face.
The only difference between abled and disabled bodies is that moving a disabled one is work.

Beside me abled bodies swooshed by. Heels tapping the stairs as light as feathers, hands soaring above the infected chrome.
I study them, they study me. My plaited cotton skirt covered in blue roses, the lace knee-highs making their way down my tensed muscles. The somewhat too transparent t-shirt. (This is the femme part of this text)
They have time to study me since my climbing up the stairs gives them that. I only have time to catch glimpses of them. In these glimpses I must make up my mind about them. Who they are, where they come from, where they are going and why they are going there.

When climbing these stairs I find I am on display. I try to make a room where I feel comfortable being displayed. A perfomance.
I try working my body up the stairs with force, I do not shun my gaze when those patting heels and the eyes of their bearers look at me. The situation make me as overt as I have ever been. There is no way I pass for ablebodied right now and there is indeed nothing I can do about it.

Visability has a price, invisability an even higher one. If making everytime the elevators wont work and climbing is a fact a perfomance is the only way to remain true. Do it!
Remember: it is not the body that cripples a crip but its enviroment.

When I have climbed all the way up. I brush my hands on my skirt, draw a deep breath and enjoy the security of my walker again. (Mind you mountain climbing only works if someone is behind me carrying my walker.)
As always my head is held high, my back is a straight as it can be. I make my way through a crowd that will never known I just perfomed to save my life!

Now is the time when MacGuywer would have made a cableway for himself using an
old gum and his sholaces. Sadly I have none of his skills.
-From my soon to be finished monlouge "Jonathan!" on surving as a crip!