October 17, 2012
And on the seventh day of chemo week he shaved his neck
beard and felt that it was good.
October 24, 2012
If at any point in this journal I sounded as if some
milestone or another made me feel like there would, in fact, be an end to all
this yark, please forgive me for misleading you. It was only after this month’s chemo effects
began to subside that I can honestly claim to have seen the tunnel’s end.
After the first month’s treatment, I could still see the
light behind me if I cared to turn around; but it was no paradise’s light
beyond the entrance—more like the sickly fluorescence of hospital wards—so
forward into dimness was as good as the way over my shoulder.
From then on, each round bore me deeper into the mountain of
this metaphor, deeper into the metaphor’s darkness. A darkness with dripping limestone plicking
the slick, blind path ahead. In this
metaphor there are bats named Legion about your ears—the whirruping of whose
wings drive out any hope of cogent thought, any thought of hope. There are lurking slimerifousnesses mustering
ambuscades to squelch whatever fleet comfort one derives from (to speak
literally now) Tropical Smoothies.
If at the quarter-mark, taking the first turn, I led you to
believe that I had gathered some momentum and could stride apace, knees never buckling, until I broke the wimpy
crepe-streamer at the finish line, forgive me.
Wrong metaphor.
If in July I seemed to be saying that I had crowned the
summit, could descry my destination in the verdant valley below, and had only
to begin my descent, vertiginous though it may be, precarious with leafy
pitfalls, jagged with jags and thorny with thorns, but visible and beckoning
nonetheless, forgive me. Wrong metaphor.
If even just last month, I claimed to have rounded third and
to be sprinting toward home-plate, reaching full speed, ready for the rapidly
nearing collision with the armored hind-catcher, ecstatic in the notion of a
walk-off score, of a locker-room champagne shower and a morning show’s people already
in touch with my people . . . wrong metaphor.
All apologies.
But now, there is a twinkling. A lone pulsar like a pinprick
in the black night funneling grains of daylight.
Ten months of purported progress, of going forward for fear
of going back, back to the sickly fluorescence of hospital wards--but now, there is a twinkling at the end of
this metaphor, the proverbial light—in a manner of speaking, figuratively, that
is, my journey in opacity, of bat-attacks and chilling limestone drips, is approaching
the point of return.
I can see it.
Honestly.
