Six months after the second surgery my scars look like little staples. Like sidecars, stacked, or the train tracks they travel. They’re perfectly parallel to the first set, the ones I got a year ago, when I was a cancer rookie, not even one stack of scars.
Now I have two, side by side, like salmon swimming upstream. Like trees near the river’s bank reflected on the water. And I’ve been feeling time lately like the first falling of leaves that signal the end of the season, so every morning I admire myself in the mirror. Not my beauty. I’ve gotten rid of my beer gut, but there’s not much else to look at. Too many lines. Too many memories. Too much trauma, mostly from the bottom of a bottle.
But I’ve held together. I’m still scrawling obscene odes on the windows of the skull, as Ginsberg once wrote, and I admire people who hang in there, so I have to admire myself.
Which is hard, but I swear I’m trying. I’m being kinder to myself. I quit drinking. I ate a vegetable the other day.
I’m even putting out positivity. I’m killing with kindness. I’m fucking incandescent with enthusiasm.
But sometimes, late at night, for example, when the house is quiet and I’m the only one awake, sometimes my scars look different. It’s not very often at all, really, but some nights instead of sidecars they look like incisions. Like openings.
On these nights I know I’m thinking of what happens if the cancer comes back. These nights my scars don’t look like they’re holding me together—they look like the first signs of my unseaming.
Thank you for lovely and vulnerable writing. Thank you for trusting us. Thank you for sharing.
Fucking incandescent. Full stop. 💜