Remember not to leave

ouroboros.  

I listen to a book about honesty. Well, the book isn’t just a book about honesty where, let’s say, honesty is researched and laid before us like a rendering of the perfect place to live. Or a calculation based on data collected by samples of different kinds of people who behave in certain ways socially to uphold invisible cultural expectations. This utopian place, where I suppose the absence of fear is replaced with oceans of acceptance. Like warm bodies of water, we all find each other there. Body parts in all their ageless glory abound. Instead, the book tells a firsthand account of what life would look like if all filters were stripped away and all that was left was the freedom to explore your whims without the guardrails of these cultural expectations, neither perceived nor real. I drink the book up like I might an extra dirty martini if I didn’t know so well that drinking one might as well be eight, and then I naturally drink eight. The point is I consume the book and feel drunk on it. Like a spider web, each silk thread ripples out, further stretching the parameters of everything around me. Making this moment a delicate yet expansive shelter. On occasion, it has me forgetting things, too. Like my own life and its guardrails. It reminds me of time travel, and poof, I’m gone again. I wouldn’t call them daydreams but outlines of October light. We can’t ignore any of that magic or the shadows. This time of year, I see things more. I see things differently. It’s in everything. It will be fifteen years in November since Fonz and I crossed the last line in the sand between us and gave into the part of our lifetimes-long story where we fell in love. And in the same month, it will be thirty-three years since he first passed me a note in detention. Just a month or two ago, I was not sure what line we were crossing while we fumbled home from the part of his treatment we’d been in training for the better part of a year. I wondered if we were fumbling into each other or away, or where we even are anymore. I’ve been wondering about the hole in the shower floor and where everything goes when it washes away. That’s true. The cover for the drain is gone, and a portal has been opened to somewhere else. Not everyone would agree with me, but I am sure there are things we must let go of so they can disappear. I realize the drain is a living metaphor for everything I still need to let drown. Another word for this might be surrender. I’ve used the word one million times already and maybe not understood until now. The stripping away called for more than I thought it would. Fonz starts a clinical trial last week. Which feels more like induction therapy, the name for the kind of chemo Fonz received for ten months leading up to his stem cell transplant. He calls me from Kaiser four or five times while dealing with so many logistics and sitting there for hours last Thursday. We used to be there on Wednesdays. I hadn’t considered if we’re in the later part of the week now, beyond humpday, because we’ve ascended or progressed or settled into some new terrain of treatment. I doubt Kaiser or anyone else would think of this. But I do. It’s all I think about as I still try to make sense of things, of cancer, and how it wraps itself around your life and squeezes you every time you try to think of or do something else. Amidst everything terrifying and devastating last week, Fonz returns to his work as a patient. Lest we forget for a moment, he has a new part of himself that is also a part of our family. It’s called cancer. Squeeze. Among the devastations, there are hurricanes and wars and elections and sweltering heat. There were fires, and it was so hot it’s mostly what anyone talked about, making us all ridiculous and boring and still hot. But because of this, at home, we melted all together into a candle or a crayon or a new version of a family. I always did, but somehow, I love them so much more each day. Squeeze. Squeeze. We watch stupid TV shows where talented people compete for the attention of the entire country. I think this was made, literally made, for us to watch. We’re like everyone else when we watch it. Just a family with regular family lives. Luna is rapt on the edge of the couch with a smile. Rafi screams at the judges when she disagrees with their critiques. I think there is nothing better than this. For a minute, I forget that there is a world with so many wonderful things to learn and explore. But who needs that when by after school on Friday, the day after Fonz starts treatment again and I’ve cried and cried about being pulled back into the scariest place I’ve ever been, Fonz and I sit on the couch while the girls take a bath and talk about perimenopause. This is utopia, I think. The place where we both have bodies and their truth is accepted. Later that night, we lay awake in the dark, and I recognize us as ghosts from another life. We are familiars, and this, for the moment, is all I’ve ever wanted. Despite the cancer and the heat and the bills and the parts of us we battle around failure and shame, we can lay beside each other. I’m half crying about how he’s back on medication, and he comforts me about this, and in this strange twisting of our hearts and limbs and bodies and bones, I feel so deeply cared for, and it’s stunning. We are being squeezed together, despite the heat and the mystery of everything else around us, despite the fear and the brokenness and everything that goes down the drain or is released and gone, we can feel the squeeze so tightly until we’re finally at rest, dreaming of spiderwebs.