“One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.” -Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda

“My pain is self chosen, At least I believe it to be. I could either drown, Or pull off my skin and swim to shore.” -Lane Staley, River Of Deceit

One week into treatment and I’m already feeling a little weird. I knew this was coming. These are not benign drugs. I had been starting to feel pretty good physically. But as I embark on the sixth day of targeted gene therapy, I’m back to waking up at 3:30AM, my mood seems a little darker, and I have this feeling like right before you get the flu. There’s a jaggenedess to me that I feel on a cellular level, and every now and then, the hint of a headache appears briefly before fading away. I’ve been short with Alyssa too, and I feel guilty for it. Is it the stress and anxiety of the next step in this process? The waiting to see what will happen next? Maybe.

The dread is the worst. I’m still not totally convinced my latest diagnosis is correct.

A Gift?

I have always known I’d get cancer. Like its my destiny. I know you think that’s stupid and crazy, Reader, but it’s true. At least its true that I’ve always thought this way. Its not just that I was worried I would get it. I was convinced of it. I thought I had it when I was 8 years old. My parents humored me, took me to the pediatrician. He looked me over and said,

“You don’t have cancer.”

But I was a smart fucking kid and I knew when I was being ‘handled.’ I knew that in order to really tell, he had to run more sophisticated tests than just giving me a quick once-over. I didn’t know exactly what those tests were, I was 8, but I knew he had to run them to really know. My mom already had cancer at that point, and I knew they did all kinds of tests on her. But she was sick and sitting right there, and I didn’t want to be a pain in the ass, so I just said “ok.” She died several years later. After that, I never really wanted to know what a doctor had to say, and I pretty much stopped going to see them. But that fear sat inside of me and festered, and grew like…well…like a cancer.

As I sit here now and try to figure out how in the hell I wound up here, I consider how I’ve lived thus far. And the answer to a different question occurs to me: Why have I been living in the way I have? The answer (or part of it), is that so much of what I was doing was serving one purpose: to stave off fear and awareness. This is a hard thing for me to acknowledge. I’ll spare you all the sordid details of the vices I implemented to keep my fear and awareness at bay, though the voyeur in you may protest. Suffice it to say, I’ve treated my body like a rental car; like something I don’t give a shit about but still expect to work. Through all of this though, my goal has never been self destruction.The goal has always been an evermore effective form of denial. Denial of a body I did not trust, a body I feared. I cannot do this anymore. And now, in the absence of my previous coping mechanisms, I am left with this body, fractured from the mind. And the reunion I seek is a painful one. Like estranged family members coming back together out of necessity, its more than a little awkward. It’s upsetting and uncomfortable look at.

So I find myself sitting with a sense of dread that remains constant. Omnipresent. And without my former agents of denial, I’m getting pummeled by the darker side of me. Don’t worry Reader, I’m not going to go totally dark on you. That’s not my style. Its just kinda rough right now, my state of mind. The person I’m left with is so fucking sensitive and vulnerable. Its hard to endure and even harder to contain. I feel the urge to really tell people what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling on a regular basis. And you can do that with some people, obviously, but you can’t do that with everyone. You can’t just walk around completely cracked open, letting everyone see your insides. Can you imagine sitting next to me on a plane!? You ask me how its going, expecting the customary, perfunctory white-guy response, “fine thanks, and you?” but instead I actually tell you? I start talking about all of this? You might get lucky and catch me at a high point, but at some point during the flight, I’d tank and you’d be like, “Oh shit, get me away from this guy!” Because how I really feel so often now, is anxious, scared, confused, and even lost. And I do worry about the impact this has on the people I’m close to, most of all, Alyssa. I worry she’ll get sick of it, or crack under the weight of my thoughts and feelings. She never does though, and there is a feeling of security I have when I’m in her presence. I feel it even when she’s not there. I am grateful for it. Nevertheless, days like today, and moments like this one, right now, are hard. I can’t get away from it. Ever. These fucking feelings. They are the worst– at least that is what I tell myself, that they are worse than physical pain. But then I ask myself:

“Are they really worse?”

I don’t know what the answer is:

“…sometimes?”

Mornings

Sometimes things surprise me and I feel good-ish, interested in the morning for the morning’s sake. Sitting on my fire escape, observing the gradual brightening of buildings in the quite dawn makes me feel hopeful.The smell of a single, distant cigarette in the pinky hue of the morning fills me with pleasure… and deadly carcinogenic agents. I recall how much I’ve always enjoyed the morning in a busy city like San Francisco. Its different than morning in nature, which is of course also beautiful. But for me, it has always been dawn in the city. I love to sit alone, watching a single cafe worker sweep up in front of the shop, setting up the tables before the rest of the city shows up. I had forgotten how much I love this. I first experienced this just after college, while traveling alone. My sleep schedule was all outa wack, so I’d just get up and head out before the sun was up. That’s how I discovered it, by accident. I know I’m not the only one whose enchanted by the dawn. I’m certainly not the first write about it. You can’t get more cliche than writing about the beauty of the morning, but fuck it, my problem is that I forgot. I forgot how beautiful it is. How could I have forgotten about something like this? I don’t know. Wait, yes I do.

What is it about this part of the morning that feels hopeful? The dawn has so much promise, potential. Its gotta be the same as what we love about youth, right? We see the possibility. One never looks and feels so good, as when one is poised to embark upon the journey of what one could become. I contrast this with my feelings about the late afternoon. I dread the late afternoon and its long shadows. I struggle to accept it, what it implies. Late afternoon is when my mood tends to drop and when I begin to worry. I’m working on learning to love the late afternoon. It does have its own beauty, as people return home from the day, reconnect with other people who they care about. After all, those other people are the whole reason they went to work in the first place, aren’t they? Which brings me, in an out of order way, to The Day itself. I skipped it, unintentionally, but perhaps appropriately, because I don’t actually know how I feel about the day right now. Most of us are probably lost when it comes to how we feel about the day, why we engage in it in the first place. It always changes, how you feel about the day, doesn’t it? But this too has been written about before- the way we lose our way, get caught up, forget what is most important to us. And yet, despite its cliche, we still do it. It’s only natural I suppose.

I think about his stuff now. A lot. Such thoughts seem clearly tied to my mood and used to be fleeting, which is how I wanted it. They aren’t fleeting anymore. They stick. Like an impotent usher,I can’g get them to move on. I’m not sure what to do with all of this. I just wish I felt more confident to cope with my mood, without the fear that I will disintegrate or be annihilated. Some part deep inside me seems to know I won’t. But that part feels so deep inside, and small like a candle, not even a candle, more like match flickering deep in the dark. I I know I can’t trust my my mind when it starts going that way. That is what it feels like to me. I won’t say it feels this way all the time, because I don’t feel that level of dread all the time, but its a lot of the time. Its enough. Things can get dark for me in the afternoon. The meaning of my life seems to drain out, and all that’s left is the most dreadful desire to to live. And it is a dreadful desire. An urgent desire. Misplaced in some ways because my life is not currently, eminently in danger, not at this exact moment. But it has been threatened, a shadow cast, and it’s scope and span has been called into question.