Non-Fiction

Nerves danced beneath my skin, prickling and intensifying with each passing moment. The TV droned in the background.

I slip through the conference hall as swiftly as my pumps allow, with a big smile and a wave to my venture capitalist buddies in back.

Three times he said “I love you” and I didn’t notice. Not till later. Days later, even, when I would be lying in bed and suddenly it would hit me.

I struggled to unzip the the bottom layer of my wet-look, sunshine yellow, vinyl, fully lined raincoat to transform it from maxi-length into midi.

I remembered, as I always do at such moments, the remarkable series of epiphanies I experienced on a Monday evening twenty-five years ago.

I fold into a weary pigeon and dream about what it would feel like to perfectly execute a bear, a spoon, a spider, to live inside a healthy body that is not chronically ill…

Breast cancer causes profound loss and grief. We grieve the loss of our bodies. We grieve the loss of our feminine identity.

Once, in an ultrasound room, a technician in a faded grey frock asked me which pregnancy this was. “My ninth,” I said in a flat voice.

It doesn’t matter how old the wound is; the mere mention of him makes my mood shift. “Let the past be the past,” they claim. I am. “What’s your problem?” I have none.