Cutting Time plus Ten days

“The birds, they sing at the break of day,
Start again, I heard them say,
don’t dwell on what has past away
or what is yet to be.

The wars, they will be fought again.
The holy dove, she will be cut again;
bought, sold, then bought again…
the dove is never free…

…You can add up the parts, you won’t have a sum.
You can strike up the march, there is no drum.
Every heart, every heart to love will come,
But like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”

-Leonard Cohen
paraphrased lyrics from Anthem


Cutting plus Ten days. This was my last day on the Acute Care Ward. Tomorrow I go to Rehabilitation. No physical therapy today, but I did exercise and walk a little…just to use the restroom, and with Michael’s help…Not being able to get myself to the Can ranks fairly high on the list of large traumas and small humiliations…yet Perspective demands that I view this list with new eyes, and recognize that at least I have the option of walking and sitting, of pissing and moaning. When I count my blessings it is not long before I shut my pie-hole in shame and start doing leg lifts in bed.

For reasons I cannot explain, even to myself, this was a day for weeping.
After waking to a particularly grim dawn, with the dripping-sweat tangled sheets drawn tight around me I watched the sun sparkle through the beige blinds of my window. In the right light they look like bars. Med techs came and went, drawing blood, measuring the vital, tidal changes of my body and adjusting the balance with potent medicines and food as they saw fit. I let this go on as if it were someone else, or perhaps an empty shell I had vacated. We found a cadence, they came, worked on my body and I was a pliant patient…they left and as if a faucet had been opened fresh tears leaked from my eyes. I resisted this no more than I resisted the gathering of my blood and rhythms.
The funk lasted throughout the morning, only dissipating briefly when Gayle and Michael came over to help out, bringing also some sunshine and big love into my room.

Nevertheless, though I honestly tried to rise and be human, it was a poor attempt, made up mostly of self-centered fragility and exhaustion. Still, feeling real gratitude, I tried to repay their soulful efforts with trust. I set aside misgivings of hurting them further and tried to explain that I just didn’t feel like myself today, that something new and wicked has crept into my brainscape. Not to mention feeling as if I had just been smashed by a runaway train.
There is something wrong that I can’t identify.
And in the last two days it has grown from a nagging suspicion to an active anxiety. A small series of events, of gathered disappointments and too much pain set me up. Left to my self I opened the floodgates and let it all out, again.

Into this salt-strewn lament Michael came in the early evening, back from a teleconference to Alaska at the hotel. Bearing gifts, he brought a beauty of a Fuji apple, dark chocolates, and two perfect thank you cards that I had requested, cards that Gayle chose with her usual unerring insight and good taste.
Moreover, he brought a breath of calm strength, as if he carried it like a cloak of peace wrapped about him. Just when I needed it most, he was there to ease me out of the knot I had twisted myself into. Gently, but with some intensity, he told me to quit keeping score and just play…hard. These words are still rippling around my mind, floating in my dream sea and changing all that they touch.

I can no longer stomach the fearful whining in the back of my mind.
It is my Reptile Brain that is keening, the cerebellar offender so recently cradled in the hands of Dr. Green.
The reptilian, hindbrain, mindgame whimpers now and mourns for the piece that Doc burnt away.
My Lizard King self cares nothing for the frontal cortex, it cares nothing for the bone-jar body that houses it. It is eternally dreaming Jurassic desert dreams; dark visions of cold, scaled flesh writhing in a knot of slithery, buzz-worm love.
Those dreams were interrupted ten days ago when light and cool air flooded onto that which was intended to forever remain in bone-domed darkness. And despite the knowledge that I am engaging in catastrophic thinking, there is a growing suspicion inside me that my cranial coral reef will never be quite the same.

Sometimes I hear my own voice responding to the wounded Lizard King, crooning in crocodile tones what all of us in here wish to wail out loud, “I am scared. Make it go away. Can I go home now?”

Given a choice I would rather be dancing in the moonlight,
with the crunch of snow beneath my feet, and Raven song echoing in my head.
And I will, after I learn to walk again.

-End Transmission-
Dawn McKenzie