The Surface of Love, Battle, and Illness

Last week, a phlebotomist filled twelve vials before I could finish the comic strip on the wall to my left. “Hold.” My fingertips obeyed, pressing gauze to elbow crease. “You OK.” I thought she meant it as more of a question than it came out, so I skipped the last panel and turned to her. Her eyes flicked away from mine. “Thank you,” I said.

Months ago, I couldn’t have conceived of a winter writing desk looking out from second-floor bay windows on a world I’d explore with diminishing gusto. In January, I had to waddle like a penguin to the woodpile. Now that spring, sopping green, has brought tree frogs to lull me to sleep, it’s not ice sheets hindering my movements.

Carmine clues delivered via MyChart predawn are only slightly less cryptic than the pain in my large joints. In a healthy woman my age, red blood cells drift to the bottom of a test tube at a range of 0 to 20 millimeters per hour. Mine drop at more than four times that speed. That means there’s inflammation. Could have saved you a trip. I chuckle at my low back’s cheeky retort. Scan the order for an MRI.

A spotted towhee whistles. Look up. Beyond my screen, leak after leak springs in Ponderosa boughs, letting loose a fountain of cream. At the back of the property, the sky periwinkles. Only, a pewter fold of firmament lingers, holding on just one more moment to the spot where it crumpled against earth, both spent, before returning to sky, where diurnal beings are accustomed to seeing clouds.

Does it strike you, too, as brilliant that the frogs simply slept through all that ice? Patience as intelligence? Highly concentrated glucose coursed through veins, an antifreeze warming vital organs and cells.

Virginia Woolf asked why illness isn’t among literary topic pillars.¹ Like love and battle, it can hold us under, just below the belief we’ll ever know, or ever have known, for that matter, anything different.

I got drunk at a fancy-dress party once. I had a boyfriend who preferred to act unattached in public. I flirted with a dark-eyed painter. We danced like two strips of plastic caught in the same breeze. The painter would, that spring, drive me home from an overnight wedding my boyfriend left early. We’d stop at a beach. Ocean caressing our legs, our cheeks stroked by sun, yet miles from mine and my boyfriend’s doorstep, I’d feel light and free. It was like that at the fancy-dress party. Until I threw my head back to laugh at a deposit from the painter’s lips to my earlobe. My boyfriend stood on the staircase above, his features fixed in the pained aha of a teacher returning mid exam to the answer key in a prized pupil’s hand. Even before our eyes fully met, he turned and went up.

I tore myself from the cocoon the painter and I had woven on the crowded dance floor and out into the January night. Still blocks from home, I slumped to the curb. I felt I deserved its iciness penetrating my thin dress as lava flowed down my cheeks. 

By the time my boyfriend found me there, I was no longer crying. “What are you doing?” he demanded, “What are you doing?” before pulling me to my feet. At home, he stripped my dress off, pulled me under covers, and wrapped his body around mine till numbness gave way to shivering and then sleep.

When I first arrived at my bay-windowed house-sit, I plotted a quick two-mile jog for every other day, non-hiking days. From porch, dash by rhododendron, cypress, and into grove where robins strut; scamper through gate past pond; hug fence line; weave around bathtub garden beds and three-sided shed; gallop up stone stairs, up steep front drive; and return to porch—twice. Now, most days I plod less than a single circuit. I shuffle through weekly hikes, asking my cousin, “Do I look like I’m walking ‘normal’”? and receiving dog lean hugs from a black shar-pei with a soul so new it gleams. Swelling biceps, I half-joked then, were as much motivation as roaring fire for wood chopping. Now, I temper a gnawing heaviness in my shoulder by two-arming my reach for the bedside lamp.

Still, the pond beckons me to search for jelly-covered egg masses tethered to sticks. The tiny creatures incubating there wouldn’t yet recognize the KRIK-kreek, KRIK-kreek that will blossom from still-forming throats to unfurl next year’s night music. Each time I check on them, I stop to see new star magnolia blooms. I breathe deeply. Tiny rivulets trickling through the grass, emerald sprinkled with buttercream lawn daises, feed the pond.

I’m not sure what first planted the lesson that it’s safer to keep “weakness” and uncertainty to myself. I’m not sure I’d even want to recall all the ways I’ve nurtured it. I only know it feels like a seed—my showing you the young woman frozen on the curb, a story I haven’t shared with anyone, and the woman now ambling out to watch for tadpoles.

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Thank you for being the ears and eyes I share my redefining, my relearning with. It means more than I can say. May we all nurture new seeds of understanding, new ways of surfacing mid the sea changes that come because we are alive and breathing and watching the earth circle round to rejoice at its reunion with sun daily. I’d be delighted if you vote for more by subscribing to receive weekly missives or upgrading to a paid subscription to support this work.

1. “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf, pdf, https://thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf.