127. LIVE AS IF YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE

From the Archives

(July 2005) Just went out in 99° weather to get my yard mowed so I can leave at 4 AM to attend my uncle’s funeral. He was only 52 and in great physical condition (we thought) before he dropped dead of a brain aneurism.

Sobering.

The service is at my grandparents’ rabidly primitive Baptist church in a tiny southern farming community and I am uncomfortable going there because the place is so blatantly homophobic. They’re southern first, though, so I know they’ll be distant but civil to me (unless I’m alone on some dark road when the judgmental rough boys come out to punish difference).

Have been pondering the picaresque poet and co-blogger Demiurgicgpoet's experience showing up queer at her southern family's church for a funeral and boy is her story familiar. It’s so odd to be around people who insist that you are condemned because you actually choose to—to paraphrase Mary Oliver—let the soft animal of your warm body love whom it loves.

But what else can you do and still remain true to your self?

The Baptist compulsion to silence differing worldviews, to cast people with ideologies that disagree with theirs as evil is familiar to me. And Baptist women just confound me. (Well, as do Muslim women. Or Catholic women, for that matter. Or any women who embrace a tradition that places them in a subordinate position and choose to participate in retrograde religious traditions that insist that they “submit graciously” to men.)

These traditions confine women to marginal positions, then the men in their lives point to this marginalization as evidence of the women’s presumed inferiority.

This is the legacy I inherited and I still ponder what it is that keeps women who have other options in such a confining space.

I’ve never been able to explain the whole Southern notion of family honor to nonSoutherners either, but reading about Arab culture is familiar too.

Honor, in this culture, "requires that women give up their individuality in order to maintain the reputation and prospects of the men in their lives. This turns women into communal property, so that their lives don’t actually belong to them but to their families, their tribes, and sometimes even their nations." (That’s by gorgeous best-selling dyke author Irshad Manji, from The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith.)

I learned early on that I’d have to either put myself out of my misery or find the wherewithall to break the damn silence and talk about how oppressive it is to grow up rabidly Baptist (or rabidly anything that minimizes our whole beautiful selves)—and this probably explains why I tend to create fictional characters who yearn to escape their oppression.

So yeah, I know what it will be like to return to Baptist Town USA as a queer who publicly rejected the Baptist sledgehammer that so many of the people who will be at the funeral used to try to pound me into a particular shape ...

... and don’t even get me started on this Supreme Court nominee who has a record of seeking to weaken the separation between church and state. This guy can tip the scales, people, and that scares the living crap out of me and makes me want to mail copies of The Handmaid’s Tale to every thinking citizen of this country.

•

No big surprise, but I have been thinking about death and relationships today.

Buddhist philosophy recognizes samsara, or the endless cycle of suffering. All gain ends in loss according to this principle, yet we continue to compete and fabricate a chain of desire that keeps us in samsara. That which we gather, we will lose. Our pleasure will eventually lead to pain. Or “Gain and loss are meaningless preoccupations that we use to foster the illusion of a permanent self.”

Sigh.

Buddhists advise that, after becoming familiar with the truth of our impermanence, we should practice sitting and living as if our hair were on fire.

LISTENING TO: ani defranco croon fuck you and your untouchable face. Fuck you for existing in the first place. (yeah)

READING: J-14 Style Summer Special. This is a sad, sad magazine aimed at fourteen-year-old suburban girls and one day soon I will quote from select articles.

118. FATHER’S DAY. NO FATHER

From the Archives

(June 2005) Father’s Day is so strange now that my father is dead. I try to think about him, his role in my life and what I’m grateful (and not so grateful) for, but it mostly just feels like a big hole that he used to fill with his goodness and his badness and his deep connection with me, for better or for worse.

Since last Sunday was Father's Day and this past Sunday was his birthday, he's been on my mind a lot. So here’s a poem for my father:

FOR MY FATHER
by Elise Partridge

Remember after work you grabbed our skateboard,
crouched like a surfer, wingtips over the edge;
wheels clacketing down the pocked macadam,
you veered almost straight into the neighbor's hedge?
We ran after you laughing, shouting, Wait!

Or that August night you swept us to the fair?
The tallest person boarding the ferris wheel,
you rocked our car right when we hit the apex
above the winking midway, to make us squeal.
Next we raced you to the games, shouting, Wait!

At your funeral, relatives and neighbors,
shaking our hands, said, "So young to have died!"
But we've dreamt you're just skating streets away,
striding the fairgrounds toward a wilder ride.
And we're still straggling behind, shouting, Wait—!

110. DEATH BE NOT...

From the Archives

(June 2005) Just got the sad news that my friend Ed is dying. He and I created many a theater set together while trying to convince the wardrobe folks to let us try on outrageous outfits.

We have an annual ritual that involves lots of beer and tubing behind his boat.

We’ve done this for years, bur our first outing was definitely the best because our pal Roger turned out to be as fearless as I am.

He and I played bumper-tubes first. Then Ed got us going really fast, so we began making wider and faster sweeps across the wakes until we actually managed to get ourselves airborne. It took us a few tries and some nasty wipeouts, but we eventually managed to slap our hands together in the air and then land back on the water upright (no small feat, let me assure you).

Ed says he likes to watch me tube because a big smile is plastered across my face the entire time.

I walk around bruised and sore for weeks, but oh are our adventures fun!

Ugh. Poor Ed. He survived pancreatic cancer—one of the most painful kinds—already and then a recurrence in his lungs last year, but now his doctor says there’s nothing more they can do for him, so he was basically sent home to die.

Ugh. Poor, poor Ed. And poor us for losing someone so wonderful.

88. THE BLUE WHEELCHAIR

From the Archives

(May 2005) The blue wheelchair sat abandoned by the pond.

I sat at lush gardens tonight till dark, reading. Stopped by Whole Foods earlier and picked up fresh herbs, a loaf of crunchy bread, a lime tart, and some Saint Nectaire cheese that disappointed me because it lacks the complexity of Saint Andre, which was Whole Foods’ comparison cheese.

(I knew I should have gone to the farmer’s market instead and purchased local cheese from the friendly dyke cheesemakers.)

Poured some pinot noir into a flask, then took my food, wine, Carole Maso’s Art Lover, and myself to a little creek that runs between two grassy knolls at the gardens.

A beautiful, heavy-branched willow by the water provided shade over the rough stone bench where I sat. I settled in amongst the irises that kine the boulders that line the creek that empties into the pond and read till dark as the ducks swam around me.

There’s a whole chunk of time during graduate school when I missed films and books that were not directly associated with my studies. Kenneth Branaugh and Emma Thompson were all the rage then, but I had neither time nor money to enjoy such extravagances.

Maso’s Art Lover came out during this period, too, and I missed it the first go ‘round nut, boy, what a find now!

This book is hauntingly beautiful and raw and very, very well written.

Maso’s narrative approach is intimate and disarmingly heart-wrenching and the book brims over with insights and observations and tender quirky moments that leave your entire nervous system twitching.

I don’t believe anyone in the midst of losing a father could bear to read this book, but how wonderful it must be if you find a way to acknowledge that connection as you read.

My own father has been dead for six years now and I could still hardly bear to read this story ... and the declarative sketches of her sad, suicidal mother nearly took my breath away.

Here’s an excerpt from her opening page:

Although there is only a slight resemblance, the man can only be her father. You can tell by the way he moves toward her. As she stands up now I can see the intricate jigsaw shapes their bodies make to fit together. They will gnaw off an arm if necessary to properly fit, bleed at a joint, tilt the head, or nod a little too deeply just to maintain the vaguely heart-shaped vacuum that must always exist somehow between them.

•

Meanwhile, as I mentioned way back at the beginning of this entry, someone abandoned a blue wheelchair by the pond. I’d read several chapters by the time I saw the thing and it was getting dark—cone? rod? cone? rod? and that whole confused sight thing—so I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. And the heady scent of honeysuckle was so intoxicating that I almost felt drunk. Meanwhile the ducks splashed down in the water around me as I jumped over the rocks to investigate.

I hiked up the grassy knoll and discovered that, right there by the water, was a well-used faded blue wheelchair with a sagging seat.

Maybe it’s the curse of living through a loved one’s repeated suicide attempts or maybe it’s the influence of Maso’s book or maybe it’s the fact that this garden sits near a medical center. Not sure of the source,really, but can tell you that I immediately thought that a dying patient had rolled herself—and it was a her in my mind: Ophelia, Virginia W, my cancer-ridden mother-out-law, and my sad suicidal mother all rolled into one—down from her room and into this lush, late-spring paradise swollen taut with beauty, and thrown herself into the water.

Sometimes I wonder how a person who does not have a personal experience with suicide might translate such a scene.

BEST-OF SPAM: clytemnestra portraiture. (Hmmm. Perhaps Agamemnon Spam sacrificed his daughter Spam in an effort to make it through a challenging spam editor, then Clytemnestra got revenge in a scene that was captured by a digital portraitist? Now that’s obscure.)

82. CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

From the Archives

(April 2005) Huh. My Dukie friend just e-mailed me to say that an emu is loose in Durham! Several people have apparently spotted it and called the cops, who humorously note that they can't exactly outrun an emu.

What fun!

Meanwhile, here’s a heart-breaking piece I’ve been working on for a couple of months now.

THE HOLLERIN’ CONTEST (draft)
Every June, in Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina, hollerers gather to share their lexicon of calls. Many bring their calls down from the mountains, where they developed these sounds to convey specific information across great distances concisely. An anticipatory bark might tell a wife that her man is one valley away and heading home; a piercing howl might say he’s broken his leg and needs help right away. I imagine the hollerers’ mournful voices drifting over the mountaintops, coloring the fog as it settles in.

A phalanx of Duke residents and I, wearing scrubs and beepers, wander the alley of vendor tents and crafts displays. The fact that I’m on call and must be ready to leave at a moment’s notice looms large in my mind as I study the nuances of the callers’ sounds and eat my bag of kettle corn.

A cacophony of other sounds competes with the contestants’ calls. The deejay by the kids’ rides plays nursery rhymes. Vendors shout out their wares as we pass them. Car alarms reverberate off the sound equipment as a businessman barks into his cell phone by my ear. The teenager beside him describes her new Guess jeans to some disembodied person on the receiving end of her phone call who has probably never even heard of a hollerin’ contest.

It is difficult to imagine a place devoid of any other means of communication, especially here. Research Triangle Park is headquarters to so many high-tech. communications companies, after all, a virtual Promised Land where cell phones and wi-fi–enabled coffee shops and gas-station fax machines and household T lines deliver and receive information instantly. Despite this ever-present technology, though, I have not mastered how to convey some information across great distances with accuracy.

The emcee insists that hollerin’ is the earliest form of precise communication between human beings, but I know it’s sex. Yeah, I talk a good talk beforehand, but I never really communicate with someone until we make love. My previous communications sound right, but they are guarded, selective, partial, incomplete. I reveal glimpses of myself through a copy of some poem or a humorous story about my workday or my careful, measured replies to personal questions. These words offer insight into who I am, but I dispense them from behind a protective wall that hides my vulnerability. Until I stand naked with someone, until we discover how to speak to each others’ bodies without the need for words, I am incapable of conveying love or deep emotion in unrehearsed syllables.

•

The first year that you loved me, you studied my hands in public until you knew that I knew you were doing this. Good hands, you called them. Made for fucking. Your friend Deborah inevitably called when we were deciding if we were hungry enough to get out of bed. You laughed when her call came through, said, “that would be Deborah,” told her that yes, as a matter of fact she had done it again and that she was speaking to a well-fucked woman.

We had our own language of calls then, a holy vocabulary between us.

Later, in a restaurant, you studied the thumbs that had been inside you as I remembered moving them toward that specific spot near my tongue that makes you gasp unintelligibly, each of your unarticulated sounds and movements leading up to that moment conveying so much information: where and when and how and how much and with how much intensity—precise instructions that you conveyed without ever speaking a word.

I told you later, over dinner, in whispered words that made you blush from your neck up to your hairline, exactly what I would do with my hands when we returned home and we stared across the table at each other, anticipating the moment when my entire hand would disappear inside you, reducing you to babel. We shared this quiet language of whispers in such public places.

This morning, in the emergency room, a migrant worker howled in misery. Unable to articulate the source of her pain in words that I could understand, she curled into the fetal position instead and howled at me, her dark eyes desperate. ¿Como esta usted? and the few other phrases that I learned in orientation conveyed nothing useful to either of us, so I ordered a battery of tests and sent the nurse for a translator, did what I could to apply deductive reasoning to our babel as I used my hands to search her body for some physical clue that could tell me how to heal.

Bodies convey information even when their owners can’t. They send signals to the lymph nodes that trigger them to swell sufficiently to indicate an infection; cause pupils to dilate enough to indicate a concussion or drug overdose or loss of brain function or any number of other medical conditions; dispense tears to indicate depression in patients who insist that everything is fine, just fine, just couldn’t be any better, doc. Our miraculous, fragile bodies enable us to communicate love through physical expression more profound than any word in our vocabulary, but they keep their own language too.

People who lose loved ones share a unique language too. ICU waiting-room conversations reflect this language in anguished glyphs of hope and denial and sorrow. These glyphs whisper Failure to doctors who lose patients too, but Hope is the primary word of this whispered lexicon—until I deliver the coup de grace that demolishes any possibility of it with as much distance as I can muster: We tried to save your wife, but her heart was damaged. We tried to save your son, but he is gone. Your Daddy is dead. Your grandmother has passed on. I am so very sorry for your loss.

How did the hollerers isolate that specific sound that represents loss, that mournful call that can make a stranger choke up, missing someone? Adrienne Rich knew the sound. There is no other language for it, she assures us—we have to call it grief. In my case, my friends call it bravery, too, tell me what a great job I’m doing holding up, remaining in control.

Poets reminds me that my walls do not protect me, though, that studying your blue eyes failed to provide sufficient insight into your interior world, your dishonesty. My grief moves over me in waves, becomes a mountain that I lug around inside me, that makes me obsess about that phone call I made when you discussed a meal that you had prepared the night before. For yourself, you said, this meal worthy of Gourmet magazine. Your voice said other things, too, though. And later, when I showed up unannounced and you blushed deep red from your neck up past your dimples all the way up to your red, red hair, you reiterated that you were alone, just sitting there alone because you just wanted some silence, even as I noted the two wine glasses on the counter, the dishes stacked in twos on the dining room table, ready to be put away.

I need a new language to hold all this pain, a deep-throated and gutteral holler that can convey this staggering loss.

I am on this earth to learn, after all, to at least attempt to articulate my experiences authentically and in meaningful sentences, to organize these rabbit screams that escape from me sometimes. I want to do something with these I do and forever memories that have ended so abruptly now, translate our ten years of a shared language that remains so acutely on my tongue into meaningful sounds and phrases.

I write words on charts that heal patients’ bodies, speak knowledgably about immune disorders and disease and disease prevention, but know that I have become a child again—someone who requires a cardboard wheel to identify what I am feeling. I study this wheel that is divided neatly into two concise outer sections. Am I happy or am I sad? The answer is obvious. Your body, our language, are divorced from me now. I will not see you grow old or even wrinkle around your deep dimples and what I feel is anguish. I keen in sobs loud enough to announce our broken union to our neighbors, to my patients.

I do not give you to him, but I have let you go—have walked away and know I must keep walking. I do not know this ground and yet I walk it, take these first strange steps toward a new vocabulary—some descriptive holler that can locate the hollow behind my eyes where I always feel you gone—search for a word that can make me me again.

40. LETTER IN AUTUMN

From the Archives

(March 2005) Today’s Writer’s Almanac features a sad but beautiful poem that Donald Hall wrote after losing his wife. It’s from his collection Without.

LETTER IN AUTUMN
by Donald Hall

This first October of your death
I sit in my blue chair
looking out at late afternoon's
western light suffusing
its goldenrod yellow over
the barn's unpainted boards—
here where I sat each fall
watching you pull your summer's
garden up.

Yesterday
I cleaned out your Saab
to sell it. The dozen tapes
I mailed to Caroline.
I collected hairpins and hair ties.
In the Hill's Balsam tin
Where you kept silver for tolls
I found your collection
of slips from fortune cookies:
YOU ARE A FANTASTIC PERSON!
YOU ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE
WHO GOES PLACES IN THEIR LIFE!

As I slept last night:
You leap from our compartment
in an underground railroad yard
and I follow; behind us the train
clatters and sways; I turn
and turn again to see you tugging
at a gold bugle welded
to a freight car; then you vanish
into the pitchy clanking dark.

Here I sit in my blue chair
not exactly watching Seattle
beat Denver in the Kingdome.
Last autumn above Pill Hill
we looked from the eleventh floor
down at Puget Sound,
at Seattle's skyline,
and at the Kingdome scaffolded
for repair. From your armature
of tubes, you asked, "Perkins,
am I going to live?"

When you died
in April, baseball took up
its cadences again
under the indoor ballpark's
patched and recovered ceiling.
You would have admired
the Mariners, still hanging on
in October, like blue asters
surviving frost.

Sometimes
when I start to cry,
I wave it off: “I just
did that.” When Andrew
wearing a dark suit and necktie
telephones from his desk,
he cannot keep from crying.
When Philippa weeps,
Allison at seven announces,
"The river is flowing."
Gus no longer searches for you,
but when Alice or Joyce comes calling
he dances and sings. He brings us
one of your white slippers
from the bedroom.

I cannot discard
your jeans or lotions or T-shirts.
I cannot disturb your tumbles
of scarves and floppy hats.
Lost unfinished things remain
on your desk, in your purse
or Shaker basket. Under a cushion
I discover your silver thimble.
Today when the telephone rang
I thought it was you.

At night when I go to bed
Gus drowses on the floor beside me.
I sleep where we lived and died
in the painted Victorian bed
under the tiny lights
you strung on the headboard
when you brought me home
from the hospital four years ago.
The lights still burned last April
early on a Saturday morning
while you died.

At your grave
I find tribute: chrysanthemums,
cosmos, a pumpkin, and a poem
by a woman who “never knew you”
who asks, “Can you hear me Jane?”
there is an apple and a heart-
shaped pebble.

Looking south
from your stone, I gaze at the file
of eight enormous sugar maples
that rage and flare in dark noon,
the air grainy with mist
like the rain of Seattle's winter.
The trees go on burning
Without ravage of loss or disorder.
I wish you were that birch
rising from the clump behind you,
and I the gray oak alongside.

6. BREASTS AND EYES AND PARTS ...

From the Archives

(March 2005) I’ve scribbled lyrics and guitar chords into a fat blue spiral-bound notebook for years—had the thing back when I lived with my parents and was running away all the time, so at least since I was 13. (That would be the early seventies.)

If I’d transcribed all my music into the notebook, then I would have filled it up long ago, but most of the songs in here are ones I tried to figure out on my own or ones I wrote down after somebody played them but couldn't provide a photocopy of the piece.


Anyway, I’m in my forties now and, damn it, can’t read these chords anymore!

My sad reality is that I just can’t tell if I’m looking at a G or a C or an F or an E anymore ... and I DO NOT want to get bifocals, goddurnit!

(Hmmm, maybe I can get contacts for near-sightedness instead and just put on reading glasses when I need them; yeah, then I can pretend I’m not really getting old....)

And while we’re on that topic, I had my second mammogram a few weeks ago and received the dreaded letter saying that my films revealed tissue overlap and multiple new lesions bilaterally since my 2003 mammogram. Didn’t know exactly what this meant, but knew it didn’t sound good, so I scheduled a more-extensive mammogram screening and an ultrasound pronto and waited, trying not to fret.

Me and breast cancer go back a ways. Two of my friends were diagnosed with it five years ago and within a week of each other. Louisville is one of my dearest friends—someone who refers to me as her daughter. When her partner called to tell me the bad news, I got in my car immediately, lied to a nurse and said I was Louisville’s birth daughter, and was sleeping in a chair in her room when she woke up from her mastectomy.

Louisville was my academic advisor and she became my friend and mentor. My eighteen-year-old angry self showed up in her office with a chip on my shoulder and a burning desire to go to college despite my being a runaway with no savings whatsoever who knew I had no choice but to work full-time while attending classes.

I didn’t know how to manage it but knew I wanted to (the answer: lots of good advice, determination, and student loans).

I had mostly lived on my own for three years by then and worked full-time for minimum wage in a hospital kitchen (which meant I’d never starve, an important criterion when you make minimum wage).

The tough little me who managed to finish high school with honors while scraping together enough money to (mostly) not return home knew how to survive, but I lacked self-confidence and believed I had no right to actually be in college. And each time I ran out of money and had to crawl back to my parents leeched away even more confidence, especially if my father was violent or my mother was paranoid and delusional.

Louisville swears that she could barely hear me speak back then—a fact few people who know me now would even believe.

In addition to giving me good advice and encouragement, inviting me over for home-cooked meals, convincing me to stay in school when I was so exhausted that I was on the verge of giving up and, eventually, convincing me to continue my studies at the graduate level, Louisville lined up odd jobs for me.

You don’t even want to know how many faculty members’ houses I painted in the seven years it took me to earn my undergraduate degree!

I insisted that Louisville come here for treatment so I could take care of her and she agreed. And so began her year of surgeries and chemo and hair loss and radiation and leg pains and bad wigs and floppy bra inserts and hope and fear and grace.

I did freelance work, which allowed me to go to nearly all of her treatments with her.

It was a trying year, but she came out on the other side of it and has nearly completed her reconstructive surgeries at this point. She returns every three months for scans now, but no recurrences, thank goodness.

Lizbeth completed treatment about the same time as Louisville and also seemed to be doing well. Her hair grew back in and she went back to teaching a full load. Then, while traveling to a conference, she collapsed on the Louis Armstrong airport tarmac and died. The cancer had returned and spread very rapidly, killing her before she (I hope) even knew that she was sick again.

Then, in 2003, my seemingly healthy, exceedingly wise fifty-eight-year-old, vegetarian, new-age crystal-squeezing mother-out-law who moved through the world with such vibrancy—getting dropped by helicopter into the Canadian borderlands for two-week canoeing expeditions or taking off to Peru to explore sacred ruins—was diagnosed with inoperable, late-stage breast cancer.

Doctors were doubtful that she would even emerge from the coma that first brought her to the hospital, shocking us all, and we listened to this news soberly, hoping against hope that she would at least regain consciousness.

She did and we took her home in a wheelchair, grateful for any amount of time left with her.

Mud and I and our extended family walked around in shock after that, driving back and forth to the hospital as each new crisis threatened her life and doing whatever we could to care for her body and soul as her body slowly ceased functioning.

I’d known Mud’s mother for ten years at that point and loved her dearly. She felt like the mother I never really had and her numerous kindnesses, over the years, softened many of my hard edges.

My massage and craniosacral-therapy sessions with her, especially—although emotionally difficult—made me realize just how much pain and violent memories I kept stored in my body. These sessions helped me locate and eventually heal from a lot of that pain and we talked at a deep level about life and healing and death.

She was not afraid of death but was also not ready to let go of it when she died this past April.

The local dyke chorus had been planning a large-scale breast-cancer fund-raiser for over two years at that point and I got on board with the planning. Rehearsing and performing Diane Benjamin’s heart-wrenching but beautiful oratorio “Where I Live” was hard, but so important to me.

I do not like to be in the spotlight, but was determined to say Louisville’s and LizBeth’s and Mud’s mother’s name aloud during the memorial piece. And did.

And yes, I will finally wind my narrative back around to my own mammography tests.

So. The day of my tests finally arrived and I made my way to the cancer building, followed the nurse into a waiting room with changing rooms along one wall, took off my clothes, put them in a plastic bag, donned a scratchy hospital gown, and sat in the waiting room with all the other women who had either received similar letters recently or who were already in treatment for breast cancer. A steady stream of women continued to enter the waiting room, then step out of the changing rooms transformed by thin cotton into patients whose life was suddenly brought into sharp focus by fear of the dreadful C word. There were at least three such waiting rooms in our wing and they were all busy.

Nurses called us to the testing area one by one and we endured our second-tier mammograms.

Now the first-tier mammograms really aren’t all that painful if you plan them around your period—a friend recently referred to the pressure of the plates as kind of pleasant, actually, and said that she likes the attention—but the second-tier tests hurt so much that they take your breath away.

The technician screws small plates onto the questionable areas so tightly that, if you didn’t hurt so much, you’d laugh when she says “now don’t breathe.” The tests are over with quickly though, and then you return to the waiting room and wait and wait and wait.

Some of my second-tier results were also inconclusive, so I waited for an ultrasound as, every 15 minutes or so, a nurse stepped into the room and said “Ms. X, the doctor is ready to go over your results with you now”—which made us all look up at Ms. X, whose hands fluttered as she dropped the magazine she was pretending to read down onto the table and we glanced back down at the magazines that we were pretending to read.

The ultrasound confirmed that I’m just walking around with a bunch of fluid-filled cysts—probably from all that Turkish coffee I drank like water during grad school.

This was my second cancer scare since November though and I felt like doing something drastic—kissing the sky or something. I usually just go to the beach at such moments though.