On Urgency in the Face of Ephemera.
Photo by: Corey Drayton
ABSURD INSTANCES RESURFACE FROM THE STEAM OF QUIET COFFEE MOMENTS. Echoes of the distant normal: Justine once said, over Sandy Hut ciders, the knowledge of the tumour inside me fresh in my umwelt, "What, are you trying to advertise it to everyone? They'll hear you!" that I “was far too up front about my diagnosis! Did [I] really want everyone knowing?” By extension; that I should feel ashamed, marked; keep it under wraps, not talk about it; smile! Pretend everything is just hunky-dory, y’dig? Just Livin’ the dream, daddy-oh! Trippin' the light fantastic! Kick back and crack a bottle of Vita obscura suds in the tepid summer sun of planet small.
Someone now asks, "what is the part of battling cancer that you've struggled with the most?" My mind revisits the experiential rolodex: The melting skin, passing glass at 2:00 am incontinence of radiation? The chemotherapy malaise, everything I eat tasting like 1945 Nagasaki sidewalk; my mouth filled with the briny ashes of amorous desertion? A grim diagnosis? The 27% chance of survival dancing in Fantasia nightmares with an elephantine 80% guarantee of big C recurrence? An overwhelming sense of injustice that these horrors never seemed to visit the machiavellian monsters of interstellar Faustian renown.
For me, it’s actually quite simple: a staggering aura of futility–not against the cancer itself, but the undefined, grey substrate of its genesis. I can’t determine if the daily futility with which I do combat, alongside the carcinomic Gorgon inside me, is a manifestation of the disease, or its catalyst? Biting into an apple, only dust hitting my tongue. I have felt a caustic sense of fruitlessness for a long time; a sisyphyean doom lurking on the edges of my awareness. The ego meets the reality cheese grater: a panicked urgency upon which compels one to act while simultaneously limiting one's options. Then I borrow a deep breath, and on my next inhale perspective returns: limitations are often the embers of creativity. The iconic arises out of the formerly impossible; against the odds.
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