Sunday, October 28, 2012

broadside.



it was a rainy day after so many of the same when he sat down and i got up and he was in that chair that his mother had given to us and the children that used to sleep in it after a good feed now bounced around his knees in capes and costumes that could never disguise the truth: he has colon cancer.

i have a pretty good imagination but i cannot imagine the cold, sinking feeling that must come with a diagnosis that contains the word 'cancer'. most of mine include mere mentions of things like 'cortisone' or 'sterol' or 'bronchiodialator', to say nothing of any disease other than that breathing hassle that bothers me when i do the thing that gave it to me. i stood up and came upstairs to stare at cycling goods i could not afford on a forum classifieds section populated by affluent cyclists and starving artists alike. i went back downstairs and did the dishes, just a few steps away, and there was not enough air in the room or soap in the sink. sometimes everything feels like this: just sickeningly grossly inadequate.

it's been raining for weeks here. the forecast bears more of the same for the remainder of its foreseeable future. i didn't want to ride today or yesterday. i don't feel like suiting up to run again in so may droplets and so much wind and so many things against me when everything else is already stacked. and then he sat down and told us these things, casually optimistic. words like 'prognosis' are nauseating. 'biopsy' offers no comfort. and 'protocol' is a process too clean to be undertaken by a human. we haven't cried yet. i don't know what to do to support. there must be a cancer patient's family support how-to manual somewhere. somewhere. somewhere to begin. these are the inevitabilities that sound a long way off, and then breeze to an awful stop right in front of us, brakes squealing, tires shredding, teeth gritted, the stop soon enough, or not.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Caroline had a way of hunching her shoulders to convey humility, authentic or otherwise. Well-proportioned and unpretty, she had learned the importance of suggestion without follow through, and the magnetism of her breasts over her gaze. She shifted conversations from their origins below her neckline and concluded them with a flourish of unassuming vocabulary and above-average insight. She was a prize fighter in the cafe boundaries. She always won.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

when the difference between life and death became as fine as a flicker, we knew we had become men. and when life and death reversed themselves on the shelves of our yearning, when we ran to the dark, away from the searing light, we knew that never again would we, men, be.