on a dime

here are the lists: of accomplishments, of rewards. of loss, of failures, of random disappointments. of calories burned, of miles amassed. of cigarettes avoided. of weeks in gestation. in this age a thing is not meaningful to us unless it can be quantified, visually demonstrated as progress, made into a brass plaque we can mount on our facebook wall. we'll embed it in the feed of even our most casual acquaintances--sometimes near-strangers who hold extremist philosophies we might find shocking, should we ever actually stumble onto the profile page of these people we sometimes spend entire days entertaining with links.

perhaps, then, this is my problem: a lack of brass plaques. i cannot quantify my accomplishments, or, again, maybe the problem is that you can't. i won't be reporting to facebook, livejournal, twitter and linkedin how many inches i've shed, how many ounces i dropped to regain with morning's first intake of breath (or so it might seem.) i get through each day, in spite of the ever-bright slash at my throat. cancer can do that: it can make things impossible to quantify. so i ran my paces, so i dropped my hip, so i pushed out my ribcage without involving my shoulders. so i made it through another day without retail therapy, but shredded my lip bloody negotiating the temptation. i wake up before dawn and take my pill. just like that, i just go on.

how's my health? i don't know. just as the doctor wouldn't use the word 'cancer' in my diagnosis call, none of the doctors dared to use the word 'cured' or even 'remission' in the months since. it's risky arithmetic. today i have questionable moles. i'm stalling on a mammogram. maybe this is cancer. today i have low iron. maybe that is cancer. can i have a facebook app to publicly quantify how the trauma still distorts my logic? can you hear the gaping roar of chaos behind the clicking of my fingers? no, because you can't even hear my fingers clicking. how strange.

every time ben leaves the apartment, i think: he'll die. every time i walk down the stairs to open the mailbox, i think: i'll die. my parents contract a respiratory virus; it scrapes their voices hollow over the duration of a 40 minute phone call, i think: they'll die, they'll die, they'll die. the stray cat who greets us on the complex stairs goes missing for three days, guess what i think? i'm at ground zero of a trauma bomb, but it's hardly foreign territory. again people draw concentric circles around me, partition me off, protect themselves from my sadness, my terror, my radiation. again people tell me: this is for my own good.

*
( trigger warning: describes accident, wife arriving at accident scene. )

i leaned forward and bit into his shirt, tears and spit already mixing
i sucked as hard as i could, denting the roof of my mouth with the weave of the fabric
tasting detergent, tasting the memory of his skin, oh god
oh god
oh, god.