3am: Card 2

That's how I started one day recently, awakened at 3am by errant snot in my trach, making breathing a dice game. 3AM, I sit up and distract myself with surfing the internet, checking Facebook, anything to not think of the facts at hand.

I rarely think of how I will survive, how I will feel, if I will die on any given day. I try to accept my lack of control by exerting what control I have, now, in the moment, the only place it has any agency. I'm not sure if I'm copping out or buying into reality, or even from what reality is constructed. l believe in a mystical world, but not a fatuously mystical world--magic exists, but magic isn't an explanation. To me, magic is where my reality intersects yours, sort of a thesis for phenomenology in everyday life.

 My reality keeps bumping up against the big fact I deal with, cancer, and recoiling or engaging, I find there's some magic in that balloon pressing up against that popcorn ceiling. I spark a bit, I ask "why me" for the umpteenth time, I engage death, and what I hope it leads to, I engage my daydreams of what I'd be doing if I could in a body that seems to be boxed in an every decreasing enclosure. At 3AM, I look at an online tarot site, ask my silent question, and in answering it, the deck pops Temperance into slot number 2. It's the only connection that seems to remotely reflect my life that stands behind my question "will my health improve?" because it's true.

I'd accept no great improvement in my health to experience peace, balance, normality. I don't place much faith in prognostication, and tarot is only good with witnesses around you, friends, drinking wine and passing the joint. How I dealt with it in undergrad would work now, if only I could drink wine and smoke j's. I go to jobs@IU, another fantasy, at 4am, still sitting up, still constructing scenarios in my head that owe nothing to errant ephemera. I do this regularly. I read about jobs like I read food receipes, drooling, thinking of how well I could do A or B. Over the summer jobs opened up that I would kill to have, if only having them meant I didn't have to work, which I clearly cannot do. I look at the jobs site as this negative but reality based melody plays in my head. I look at houses I could buy after winning the lottery on Zillow. Apartments in NYC for a few million. Savannah historic homes or Charleston penthouses, I think of places and look.

It's well past 4am, my breathing has slipped into a normal pattern. I pause and stare at my laundry basket, my eyes itch, there's a spot on my back I cannot reach that would love my nails on it, if only for a moment. It's not to be. My reach and my grasp are vastly different: reach-wise I could walk to Vladivostok; grasp-wise, I cannot go because I would not hold up to travel that far. I need my head elevated, my feet warm, my cabin with ready heat or cooling for after I take my pain meds which often make me sweat. I need the place where my reality bumps this fact and this fact will not move. i feel like a clock that is loud in an underfurnished room. A meme by which time passes either too quickly or showly but is measured. Quckly in my reality, perhaps stentorian, quietly, slowly, in yours.