message in a bottle

ambedo.

Shipwrecked, we return from an unknown island. Foreigners brought back to a familiar shore. Still, we’re strangers somehow. I don’t know how or why this can be true. But it is. For weeks, I woke as early as I could so I could walk through the streets of a new place where I knew no one and observed homes where I knew no one inside while Fonz got his best sleep in those morning hours. The trees line everything. So full and different. Some are so old. Some new and fresh. The streets don’t operate on a grid; there are hills, and then it is flat, and they quietly wander into each other. I am an alien amongst neighbors. One day, it was a hundred degrees out; another, it was a cool sixty-five. I told a friend I either wanted to be naked or wear four jackets. And the hospital is always cold. We came back to our home a couple of days ago, but part of me is still there. I say to myself, on one early morning walk while exploring a park I find on the far side of a hill, remember not to leave. The light on this tree whose plaited branches twist across a trail I find somewhere I don’t know was soft. The ground in this soft light looked gold. The leaves were orange. I could feel the changing of seasons. But here in the middle of summer, this shift occurs in my body, and the changing season is only beneath my skin. What is happening, what has happened can’t be left behind. While the world, in its well-meaning chorus, beckons us forward, I have to remember not to leave this all behind. While there is something new unfurling, it rises from debris. We came home, but we had to bring everything with us. It can’t be boxed up. I must sit with the wreckage. I don’t have a shelf or closet space for all the parts. How healing should be an Olympic sport. One whose achievements can’t be measured with shallow breath but the long, deep pulls that open your lungs to reach your heart. Tear at it. Break it. Hold it. While we’re apart, Luna teaches me one night over FaceTime the secret to winning a staring contest. I promise her I won’t give it away, but it involves choosing what to see and really looking at it. Healing does not take two days. Especially on the first day home, you must go back to where you left. Because healing isn’t a straight line. Healing is a spiral. The staircase goes both ways. Yesterday marked one year since we were first told that Fonz has cancer. One year since we stood in our bedroom, prepared for an entirely different call from a doctor. A year after I left, I picked up the girls from camp, went for frozen yogurt, and ran into their garden teacher, who asked how Fonz’s knee was healing. It’s been two days since we’re home again, and since Fonz’s bone marrow has been tasked with producing all new cells for his entire body. Since he lost all his hair. Sometimes, it takes five minutes for everything to happen. Sometimes, it takes forever. And wouldn’t it be nice to fold time up with all the hard things like paper, put it in a bottle, and send it off to an island somewhere in the middle of another ocean? But no, we are the island in another ocean, and we must keep learning to swim.