for the record

anti-hero.

We are up early, and even Fonz comes to the kitchen table to spend time with the girls before they launch into their third and fifth years of school. After they run off to the bathroom to brush their teeth and comb their hair, I notice his profile, which is still unrecognizable to me — an unwitting stranger, and see the weariness that extends beyond him out into the distant view of another city from our western-facing window. I listen to the sound of the train far off; its horn trumpets a slow sound I make out to be the word, wait, wait, wait, each time it blows. I imagine the interior of my heart is a tunnel surrounded by water like a cenote. It says to me to move at the pace of water. Not a river being moved, but how would it move if water were to just be? My water is still and cold and calm. These threads are all weaving together. Young Ali to wife and mother to caregiver. My child part feels dropped into the raging water where the current is tidal. Converging. How I feel I determine is a taboo. I’m not happy or grateful to be home; I am deep in recovery from letting my life unravel at the hands of a disease that moves through everything and leaves nothing untouched. Although I’m not sick, the sickness still happens to me. I don’t see myself through the same eyes anymore. I don’t feel my body through the same senses anymore. For months, my writing echoed from the air onto the page. These wild feelings cast across a canyon back and forth, and the words serve as their anchor. Their witness. Since I’ve been in this tunnel, I must find another way to decipher the language. No light to show me the petroglyphs of hearts before mine walking this terrain. The women, of course, caring for the sick and young, that’s become me, but never who I thought I was - just someone I know now who lives under my skin. Today, the poles are hope and despair. The path between is lined with disdain, disbelief, confusion, and creativity like a lit match. On Sunday, the day before school starts again, Rafi comes into my office and says she needs to cuss. She’s feeling so many feelings; she needs to say “bad words” and wants to get them out. I sit back in my chair and think, don’t threaten me with a good time; this is my kind of party. I tell her that it’s really not okay to use these kinds of words out in the world, but here in my office, you can let it all out. She takes a deep and excited breath. And she lets it rip. Fuck school. Fuck summer ending. Fuck so and so. Fuck this, and fuck that. When she’s done, she looks at me, giggles with a sense of accomplishment, and tells me how good it feels. I am proud of her. This is someone who never wants to disappoint or upset her surroundings, and this quality of hers will be her work in certain situations and relationships for the rest of her life. I love watching her let go and do the thing that isn’t pleasing. Pretty soon, Luna comes barging in, and she asks what we’re doing. Rafi tells her as though I’m not sitting right there, as though she’s announcing a new wild, secret discovery. She says I needed to get some cuss words off my chest, so I came in here, and Mama let me! Luna looks at both of us wide-eyed and asks if she can do the same thing. She’s naked, naturally, because she always is when we’re home. From the moment she walks in the door until we have to leave again, she’s a committed nudist. I tell Luna she has permission to do the same as Rafi whenever she's ready. Luna stomps both feet on the ground, and then proceeds to throw herself down on my yoga mat yelling frick, frick, frick, frick, over and over again. Rafi and I exchange knowing glances like old friends and stifle our laughter. We congratulate Luna on getting her big feelings and bad words out when she’s done. While Fonz recovers from a stem cell transplant he receives after a year of cancer treatment, I recover from something nameless. Shapeless. Endless. Woman, wife, mother, caregiver. Archetypally, I’m all six sides of the cube. It’s me, hi. I’m the problem. It’s me. I’m not a Swiftie or at least not the kind that could bear to organize procuring or even dream of paying for tickets to a concert. But I am searching for words to describe all the things that are happening at once and find them often, as one does, within music. For starters, the immaculate destruction of denial. The terror of death, or should I say mortality, is timeless. I grimace at my rage. Show my teeth. I chase grief all the way to center of my bones. The same place a kidney specialist stumbled upon Fonz’s cancer. I listen to two beautiful people talking about touching death throughout life in various ways. Through various relationships. The Rabbi says the most intimate experience he ever shared with his wife was cleaning her drainage tubes after her double mastectomy. That liminal passage between worlds. Where you’re alive but also met some form of death in passing. And how the door between death and birth never closes again. They simply become each other. I think this might have happened when I scrubbed the bathroom floor every morning. Called the twenty four hour hotline in the middle of the night. Dusted off his pillow speckled with all the hair from his beard and head onto the ground when he was out of the room and vacuumed it all up before his return. Sat at his feet when he finally shaved his beard — this arresting act of letting sickness finally rise to the surface. Arranged for a chaplain to come to our daily visit. Played all his favorite songs while he received his stem cells. When I drew circles with my fingers onto the top of his head after all his cells had died - in those empty days when he was as close to nothing as his body had ever been. He would close his eyes, and I could feel relief from the heaviness of his lids. I believe I spoke the language of his body then. When at rest, across the couch, drifting on an object out at sea, we would lay together and also very far apart. How in the leaving there is an aliveness, too. Now back here, in this invisible body of mine, I am at the intersection of midlife, perimenopause, puberty, and cancer. I mean, let’s fucking party. I keep unraveling honesty from a spool. This honesty I feel is newer, more; it’s true. During this experience, throughout this experience, I am more honest than I think I’ve ever been. It's not that I was a liar, and it’s not that I am keeping a secret or secrets. It’s just I haven’t said everything. So maybe, I’ll begin again from here: fuck cancer. Like truly, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you, cancer. This is hard. Most of the time, I’m not sure where I am anymore. Turned inside out, which I likely am, and why everything feels backwards. The cosmos stretched inside my torso makes my heart the North Star, and because this is a very long night, I must follow it home everywhere.