that's austin, amanda, me and r (he wasn't bk yet) before a spring dance our junior year of high school. i had been diagnosed with hodgkin's lymphoma almost exactly six months earlier and was in the middle of chemo and radiation. my hair was mostly gone (it was sprayed pink for the occasion), i weighed 95 pounds, and i had a dual-lumen hickman catheter in my chest (if you enlarge the picture you can see the line and tape sticking out of my dress on my right side). i was cancer.i remember sometime in the midst or after my treatment ended, in my 1983 bmw (with forrest maybe? or alone?) on n. santa cruz boulevard at blossom hill (you know by the 7-11 that goes up the street to matt s's parent's house? i still think that when i drive by, running into him there on the opposite corner in 8th grade when we'd moved back from texas. *le sigh*) thinking: holy fuck, i have cancer. i was totally overwhelmed with emotion (i probably touched the scar on my neck where my tumor had been, felt i was in love with the wrong person or two people at once if that was possible (and somehow it was), that i was liked only because i was dying and staying where i was because i was too afraid to go east like i had planned) and listening to dave matthews really really loud (which always makes things feel even more messed up than they are If I leave now I might get away This weighs on me As heavy as stone and as blue as I go I was just wondering if you'd come along To hold up my head when my head won't hold on), and i remember how the leather steering wheel had really prominent stitching around the back. time was instantly marked as before cancer and after. it's still marked that way.
(this should be more cathartic than it is.) i married him. he said after he left that he knew that he didn't want to marry me. he said a million tiny (huge) things that marked time as before he left and after he left. and the morning after he did leave i remember waking up feeling that same out of body-ness and the only grounding things were 'renzo's tiny mouth nursing and the way parker's hair smelled. the lumpiness of oatmeal, the betrayal of my psychiatrist as she interrupted me to say 'you need to be quiet and let HIM talk for once' though she'd never met him until that morning. (i thought later that it was poetic that she said there were only three valid reasons to end a marriage. the rule of 'a' i guess: addiction, adultery, abuse. well, two outta three ain't bad. right? right?the difference i suppose is that with cancer i never really blamed myself. there was never any questioning 'why?' for me. it just was. this is who i was before everything changed. and this is who i am now. and these are the tattoos (the tiny bluish dots (requiring chains, a cold slab of metal, and 25 medical students) on my chest to line up the cross hatches for radiation, the caduceus (done on my mom's dining room table by a bi-polar friend from her hospital stay), the yin-yang over the tumor in my chest that i believed would somehow balance and protect me) that prove i survived. that prove that i was changed by this. but what are the tattoos that will mark this experience? (i had the urge a couple of weeks ago to get a full sleeve, another caduceus with bright green snakes wrapping around my arm, fire licking my shoulder and neck and turquoise wings spreading across both breasts and my entire back. but for what? to say again that i survived something almost ten years ago?) what can appropriately identify my body as having survived the death of someone that i loved dearly for more than a decade, a shadow person who may have been more of symptom of who i was and was not, rather than a person in his own right? what can say that this was both not my fault at all and my fault entirely? what can express the aching devastation that feels more like an echo now?
(But I learned fast how to keep my head up 'cause I know there is this side of me that wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and just fly the whole mess into the sea.) how do you not become your experiences? how do you find yourself in love again with someone much like yourself, with someone who sleeps facing the closet because he's lovely in his insecurities? because he's been marked too (but not tattooed) by experience and hurt and loss and love. or at least i imagine that to be the case. (why am i not damaged goods to this man?) and why are we blurry faced and dressed up? was i drunk? the host said he was wearing a tux, but didn't! why is the background in focus? why did steve jobs not come to that party?! i believe that there will be a time when i'm whole enough to kick him in the nuts (because that's the meanest thing i can think of right now) and know that he will not transform into that person he always was. and leave. i believe that there will be more evenings when b cooks us ravioli with homemade goat cheese sauce and then plays on the floor with thomas the train (and the kids), where d will try to beat mario (interneted up to the best cheat site) because d2 will think 'that rocks' when he sees him next, where i swish and spit gin because i have a toothache and indulge my navel gazing ways. i believe i have been here before but with different people; i'm happy.