Too Many Metaphors

Beginning again

I’m sitting at the desk for the first time in I don’t know how many months. I’m still N.E.D. when it comes to the physical signs of having cancer. But I didn’t realize how much of a psycho/spiritual crisis the experience would ignite.

I am scraped raw. Whittled down by one breast and over a dozen lymph nodes. Perforated bones, and perforated memories. Once, a week ago, I finally turned on my computer but couldn’t figure out how to access my files. I turned it off again.

My world is tiny. A few rooms. Far fewer voices. The tinny reverberation of chronic pain, of chronic loneliness. So much shame.

When monkeys have injuries, twitches, or otherwise behave in unsettling ways, the tribe shuns them. The cowed animals live around the edges of a community. Shame begets shame: the my fault, not my fault, my fault thread chasing its tail until all the faults are knotted like a net to catch everything. It’s my fault the tide flows. It’s not my-is my fault I got cancer.

Nothing flows through with ease. Nothing is at ease except the ducks who’ve decided to overwinter, resigning to the cold.

I am who I am because of where I’ve been. But I read the present like a story written in Braille. I’m illiterate. Observing an act of communication, but ignorant of where to begin. Excluded, yet I’m grounded by my fingertips that touch the dry, slightly fuzzy paper. Maybe just knowing that it means something is enough? Maybe I’m too fatigued to unlearn enough to learn something new.

I lost a friend to cancer. She lived an ocean away, so sometimes, even now, when I speak her name some kind of gremlin wakes and claws its way up through my chest to choke my voice, to push tears up past my cheekbones to well in my lower lids. Oh god, I think. This is absurd. Is this love or guilt, or are those things even distinct from one another?

That year I thought I lost other friends, in other ways. But I’d mistaken proximity and common ground for love. There is a shame in this too—in the mistaking. So many delusions: the wishful thinking and the barricades in turn.

When my necklaces occasionally get knotted, my husband is an expert at teasing them apart. Can we really do this with our lives? Go back to the beginning and untangle the hurt from the shame?

My mother-in-law is trying to teach me to knit. It’s not going well. I’m always dissatisfied with the stitches and pull them out. This leaves the yarn crimped and frayed.

Kind of useless.

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The last of this year’s wasps fly heavily in the fog. While waiting for the train, a paper wasp lands on my collar and my student wants me to swat it away. It’s fine, I say. I’m not that sweet.

I wouldn’t know if it was a queen. If so, she better be looking for a cosy place to slip into for the winter. And if not, let the worker keep looking for a bit more sugar before she’s done.

I’m not done. Just starting again, slightly out of season.

Warmly,
Ren