in your shoes
They call it a cancerversary. If you know me, you know how I feel about that word. Still. My body needed a voice a year ago, and my life has become a poem in this long, flash in the pan year since my nurse-practitioner wept as she told me I had stage four cancer. This date weighs on me, like the rocks Virginia Woolf lined her pockets with--it's heavy, inscribed in this internal calendar I keep close to my heart, the dates fluttering in the air like moths around a light--the mapping of my prognosis onto the calendar (on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to Tarceva for 13 months; on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to the second line treatment for 9 months. (My life starts to feel like a play. The list of characters: the nurse-practitioner, the oncologist, and then later in the play, the rabbi, the yoga teacher, the social worker, the stricken cancer patients, God)). I know that 22 months doesn't mean everything, or even, anything but the number shadow