My Wobbly Bicycle, 10

Last Tuesday’s chemo (#2)  took a while to get to me.  On Saturday, when the three days of steroids and anti-nausea pills were over, my wobbly bicycle got wobblier. Fatigue and achiness. White blood count dropped; I’ve been given an injection of Neulasta to get the bone marrow cranked up to produce more white blood cells.  Which makes my bones ache.Lying awake, I was pondering again this compulsion—it is that—to say exactly what this is like, what anything is like. I was seeing the intersection of writer and reader, not as an intersection, but as a singularity.  We’re not separate. We’re carbon-based beings, entirely intertwined. We exist only in relation. Try to imagine anything existing without having to describe it in relation to something else. It feels as if my effort to talk about this is not so much me talking to you, but this particular area of existence worrying its way toward articulation, which is really all of us, straining toward awareness.Why oh why do we writers lie awake trying to find exactly the right word? I am sure it’s because the closer we get to what we know of our experience but can’t quite say, the closer we are to the truth we share, but also can’t be said. The right word is an opening, a gift. Oh my, the  gifts—soup, bread, hats, hand-woven scarf, rosary, prayer shawls, teddy bear with an antique handkerchief for a shawl, paddle-boarding T-shirt, body lotion, more soup, more bread, special rock, eagle pin, trumpeter swan feathers, chocolate,  cookies, notes, cards, hilarious Wonder Gifts  (google-eyes, stick-on tattoos), chili, wool socks, hand-made jacket, yellow-submarine tea strainer, children’s drawings, books, movies, an 11-CD set of Lolita, flowers, more flowers, baskets of “survival items” from crackers to lotions. Especially the special attention of friends: calls, emails, visits—how am I to take this all in?At my last exam, my oncologist said I seemed a bit down (how good of him to notice). I said I’d just gotten four gifts in one day and was overwhelmed. Was I really “down?” That wasn’t the right word, although I’d cried when the gifts arrived. I’d say I was feeling utterly vulnerable, needing to let a lot more of our common human affection touch me than I’ve had experience doing. It’s hard to be vulnerable. It takes guts. At least for me.It seems to me that the entire endeavor to write what we mean requires a huge vulnerability. We arrive at a word that crosses the (imaginary) boundary between us all, and we’re staring straight into the face of our own selves. That’s where the guts come in. It’s not an “other”. It’s us.As Gerard Manley Hopkins’s speaker says to Margaret (“Spring and Fall”) who’s crying over the falling leaves: Now no matter, child, the name:Sorrow's springs are the same.Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressedWhat héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:It is the blight man was born for,It is Margaret you mourn for.