Soundtrack:

Walking about feeling in fire lately.

Well.

Laying about mostly, to be honest. A serious abdominal surgery can do that to a person. Immobilize fully, or at least for this ravenous spirit it feels that way.

Brushing close enough to death you can feel the cold air wafting from her core. On tiptoes dancing with the last few months of health in your life, told by wide-eyes oncologists they’re frightened for you. Leaping into doctor appointments and tests and then submitting to them taking little bits of flesh here, in my breast. There, in my abdomen, little by little giving the reaper nibbles to develop a taste for me.

And I’d walk under the killing sun to the shades of my sister trees, leaving those bits behind. Hoping the bark would abrade the palms of my hands enough so I didn’t feel the biopsy wounds so strongly. So I didn’t feel the fear.

Oh but the fear, how much of a gift she is. Hammering heart deep to the beds of my nails, my pulse shifted my fingertips impatiently, my toenails to run to the water to wash them and calm them with the cool.

Everything brighter, it still feels like my body got the message my mind hasn’t quite interpreted yet. As if I know the subject of an email I can’t click and open.

It feels like it happened to someone else, the whirlwind of surgery. Two months after my father was diagnosed with stage four cancer here I was with the same probability. As if internalized grief and trauma rotted me from within.

But it didn’t feel real as I made the appointments and shied from watching the needles. It didn’t feel real as I walked in for the much-needed surgery. Or when I woke and cried in pain. Was held for four days in hospital. Went to recover with the support of my loved ones. Came home to my awaiting kitties.

None of it feels real anywhere in my mind. My core, though, it knows. It is as if with so many hands having been inside me removing parts that had grown uninhibited, and a scar that spans from ribs to pelvis, my body feels real in ways it never has.

As if the tumors were blocking my mind and heart from the core of my very being. That searing knowing has begun to awaken again.

It’s been asleep so long, and now I lay prone, healing, unable to divert my mind from the body it has been alienated from. Distractions have been removed.

I am ceremony, ritual, I am depth and light.

Music doesn’t hurt like it has for years.

My torso reclines and my toes dance to beats they walked away from so long ago. I am sweating out hormones as I heal, crawling closer to myself than I’ve been in years.

Does it always take almost dying to live fully?

I want to lash welts into the skin, the ground, make light-night strikes across the sky with how delicate and yet unmoveable it feels to come so close to death.

I want to reach into someone and feel their heart beating, smell the acrid edge of a knife in their iron-wrought blood.

I want to sear flesh and smell the burning, straddle the agony of someone below me, howl at the moon to try and take it again.

Ravenous, and trapped in a healing skin, I’m toe-dancing awaiting clearance to rise.