Tonight, the Harvest Moon over Bloomington is bright, casting shadows in the backyard one wouldn't expect to see--a black ink over a black matte lawn, even teasing out a tip of green at the end of a black blade of grass. It's the kind of moon I think of when I wonder how the Miami felt on a summer night, near the forest, hearing the unctuous sound of locusts, the late season screw crazy chirping of crickets.
It's a moon of confusion, too--a big round ball of the tidal-empowering energy pulling one this way and that--happiness to madness, sanity to illogic. It seems perfect for me right now: I've been existing between two poles lately, but what to call them, I couldn't say. Not Happy/Unhappy--that's too prosaic; not Sane/Insane, because my head stays screwed on despite what anyone would tell you contrary. Not really OK/Not OK....there's just no easy label to affix.
After my surgical visit, I quieted. I steadied. I rationalized. I accepted. This is the way and the shape of my life, and I have to follow it. It's a path somehow created that insists I step within its bounds--so, ok, I'll play along. I cannot be fixed, I cannot change some of what has happened, I can only change how I deal with it. So how will that be?
For me, the struggle against overwhelming odds is often ridiculous, even if it makes good legends, like the Spartan 300. I'd rather concentrate on being the reed in the windstorm, not the oak. So it has been with cancer--I have tried, at each point, to make the brave choice. I have accepted risky treatment, it didn't work, now it's just put up or shut up time. So that's what I do.
It's in my social genetics. My parents were profound sorts of grimly determined people. My sister faced her version of this cancer with fortitude. My brother Jim soldiers on despite the government's best efforts to deny that he was ever harmed in Viet Nam. My brother Matt died, apparently wordlessly and immediately, from a heart that gave out with a pop. I have examples in my family to look towards when I wonder how to act or react to bad news. Good news has been too scarce on the ground of late to really discuss.
I have been groping towards an acceptance, though, that isn't born of being a victim or feeling victimized. One that is suffused with the grace of, say, a backyard full of moonlight. A lightness of being untouched, untouchable, by negativity. To allow the self to float free of conditions, to simply be, while the body does as it must to get through the course of the day--to accept, in short, that I do have not to be in jail as I have commited no crime.
Today, as part of my plan to operate in full light, in fullness of knowledge, in recognition of my reality, I had a port placed in my chest. This is a permanent placement that allows for far easier infusions and IVs, that gives the poor veins in my arms a rest from their weekly poking. Right now, I'm a bit sore, there's a bump under the skin on the right side of my chest--formerly unclaimed real estate is now colonized with value-added building. A pole barn, a place to milk the cancer cow.
I have taken what was the only part of my torso untouched by cancer, no tumor, no holes, no scars from tissue reconstruction, no damage from radiation, and given it to the practicality of fighting cancer each week--I have allowed the last part of my upper body that looked almost Mark-like to be perverted, as everything has been, to fight this shit. Needless to say, I find it worth the cost, but it's sad nonetheless to see the last old piece of me go.
The surgeon said I was rational, and I am. There is no one to fight and no one to blame and no one who really needs me to cry on them, and frankly, I'm not a crier. I find very little release in crying, and with a trach and a screwed up neck, and no drainage, crying is uncomfortable sport. Fuck crying. That's what you do when you find your glass future has met its hammer contemporary and you've made no allowance for that happening. Me, I make allowances for every bad thing--I just always do. Mostly this makes me overly prepared, but sometimes it makes me amazingly prescient. Like now.
It's a little confusing, though, to not be able to tell you how I feel--and not because I don't want to, but because I don't know how to--there's no word that encapsulates me right now. I think sometimes I'm angry and yet I don't feel angry, and I think sometimes I'm lucky, but I certainly don't feel that way. Often I'm confounded or embarassed by encountering people who stare at me, but sometimes that really makes me laugh. Dogs, surprisingly, are often futzed by me--who is this entity and what is that on his face? They look at me so quizzically that I just want to hug them.
I have lately spent my days floating on a cloud of thinking that has no shape or form--I just daydream, I suppose that's the word for it. I see myself jogging, which won't happen again, I see myself working, which I think isn't going to happen, I see myself in groups of people laughing, which I can't really do. What I see is normal me in normal situations that are no longer normal. And I feel nothing about them--they are simply visions.
A life has passed and another life has stolen in to take its place, and it did so in dark on darkness, with a yellow light behind it, casting yet another pitch of black as its shadow. But in its halo I perceive that this new life, as quiescent, as peaceful, as zen as it wishes to be, is still mine, and is still me, and there's some ass kicking motherfucker still left in it.
A little confusion can lead to a lot of good, in other words--it's a corollary to those best laid plans, to "man proposes, god disposes". What you cannot be, simply cannot be--let it go. What you can be, grab like a bitch at a tag sale and don't let go. When things leave, wave them off, hopefully fondly. When they arrive, on cat feet, through the dark green late summer, welcome them as the friends they will be.
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