Apricot Press

I spent hours in the school nurse’s office every month,
insides aflame as a strange disease pitched its tent inside my body.
Hours writing, squirming.
Hours bargaining with God,
my voice all but replaced by agonized cries.

Vignettes of a life marked by this diagnosis come back to me:
the ER attending physician who made me feel broken on Thanksgiving,
the day I entered the hospital not knowing what I would carry home.

It’s funny the details we remember,
mine the ice cream craving,
The adventures of Charlie Bucket on the screen.
Funny, or tragic, maybe.

For so long I’ve seen this interlude as my golden ticket to grief,
the first step toward an emptiness I feel.
It is a chasm that has grown layers in the intervening years,
clefts to climb, rifts to surmount.

Surveying the vast expanse, I wonder if someday I’ll see I’ve in fact
unearthed something else. For the world can perhaps sleep through a storm,
but I cannot—yesterday’s mourning becoming today’s motivation,
my way of praying to see the only way now was forward.

The only way now was to fight for myself,
sparked by an assurance of my own worth
that runs canyon-deep.

Special delivery: birthday cake.
We gathered in the common room
to share slices, the nurse having
marked her calendar days earlier
for the occasion. Laughter tripped
around the room, unsteady yet
building—the soundtrack to a life
unfolding somehow both
beautifully and anyway.

Moments honey-laced as these
produced possibility in my mind:
erasing uncertainty, creating courage.
Everything I am, everything I found there,
pointing me toward persistence,
pointing me toward my next turn to
blow out the candles.

Photo credit: Serguei Solo