August 12, 2007
A couple of really good friends came to visit yesterday, and I was really bowled over by my attachment to their invocations of a future (our camping trip next summer) where my life might be organized outside of the institutions of acute medical care. Last week, while still resident in the hospital and having been give the “gift of life” that is more commonly known as, a “day pass”, I actually referred to the place as “home” — ACK… “Well I should be home by 5…” just slipped out. Fait accompli, I had migrated my place-making antennae to a new location and it had insinuated itself in my unconscious as the “nouveau” home.
I can’t rest easy, yet. That’s the problem. I don’t know who owns this f*cked up body, but surely its only home could be in a hospital, and here I am actually at home, and I don’t feel like I belong t/here. One of the not so secret characters in this tragedy that has few comic overtones is Pain. I will capitalize Pain because it does not, or at least, has not, gone away. Like a voice, Pain has a sonorous tone, timbre, inflection and even addressivity. Pain reminds me that something evil lurks beneath the surface that might as easily, yet again, launch me over into the hospital zone. Pain put me there in the first instance. Pain could put me back. Some days, my pain flickers like a diminutive candle and almost promises to make an exit stage left. And then it returns.
And so, yesterday, when C/J and Janice and I were chatting about a possible trip to Quadra, Pain was the uninvited guest at the party whose apparent sole function was to undermine my confidence that I could ever safely leave Vancouver again. It’s insidious. And at the same time, I just want to throw my arms around the folks who, like C/J, enthusiastically are insisting on holding me inside of the circle of possibilities, joy, exuberance and futurity.
