Middle Back

It is that area between the shoulder blades and the waist where something is not right — not up in the neck, not down in the loins, but exactly in the middle. A pulling, a burning, a stabbing with a deep breath. Sometimes a dull pressure that runs along all day and by evening becomes a hard ring around the ribcage.

Medicine has names for it. Muscle hardening in the area of the middle thoracic vertebrae. Blockage of a vertebral joint. Tension in the autochthonous back musculature. Sometimes a disc problem at the thoracolumbar junction. All of that is real. All of it is describable. And yet: anyone who has lain awake at night with a painful middle back senses that the explanation is not enough. That there is more than a mechanical problem.