Days

What are days for? This has been asked and answered countless times by many artists, poets, businessmen, teachers, philosophers, moms and dads, coaches, agents and children and the elderly of any age. Yet, it's unknown and remains so. 

Phillip Larkin said 

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor   

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

True enough. My mind runs over this question continually. I'm structureless at the moment and this is uncomfortable to me, but I'm having to learn to get used to discomfort lately so I will adjust to this I suppose. I refuse to let my illness - or rather the illness of its cure - become the scaffolding upon which I build my daze.

And yet. Here it is - sitting elephantine upon my schedule, obliterating all other events and desires. How can I pretend otherwise?

I an about to do my final chemo this Thursday February 6th. Everyone around me reminds me hourly how fantastic this is. But I just feel flat. I have a bit of neuropathy in my toes that's still there after two weeks (not supposed to be there now they say - medium to large uh oh) so I called my nurse and she said if it doesn't go away they may postpone the last chemo. Quelque horreur. WHAT?!!!! Please please no. I must get this chemical destruction over. I confess - I have built my whole schedule, my wholeOctober to February life, yes yes yes I admit - my whole everything - on 10:30 am Thursday Febrruary 6, 2014 being the last time I ever allow a person to puncture my chest with a two inch curved needle and then spend five hours flooding my halls and vestibules, my formerly private and hidden, secret internal passages - with sickness and death, while I sit passively, sweetly, inviting them to do so. 

If this has to be postponed even a minute I 

I don't know. Can't finish that sentence. 

I can't wait to end this.

If my toes and fingers are still numb I may lie. I'll say they are perfectly fine and I can feel everything. Although the doctor gods want to scare me by saying this kind of nerve damage can be permanent and disabling - what if I can't button my shirts, or my pants? What if I can't hold a pencil? Walk? What if I can type my blog onto my phone? What if I can't use a fork? Change the song?

Also, my doctor will be out (Where? France I hope) so my last chemo will be with her partner - a man I've never met. I get to be poisoned by a stranger for my last dance. Will I like him? Will he be kind? What kind of man will he be? I hate him already.

Depression is another side effect of the bus crash that is breast cancer. Barely want to sit up these days. Will pass. A nutritionist says I'm low on B-12 and minerals so today I plan to drink a gallon of honey and then go outside and eat some dirt. I'm going to go to the park and roll downhill and if I land face down I'm just going to start biting the earth. Maybe this will make me feel better.

Or I could take her recommended bitter supplements. The mineral B-12 person I met yesterday was wonderful and kind, and as gentle as the daily sunny warm 2 pm afternoon rain on Mount Haleakalā.

I loved being with her and her energy. I could feel her. Yet, my research-paper-teaching brain causes me to question all information that I hear about, on any topic. I want to look at objective, credible, evidence. I can't find very much of this about vitamin B12 or organically bound minerals. Humans evolved to be healthy if we do what is healthy for our species, which is wander around all day like hunter gatherers, and eat actual food (plants and animals who eat plants all of which were plants growing in rich soil and photosynthesizing madly - so we all ate the energy of the sun). Of course we don't do this stuff so perfectly in our culture any more. So surely we could benefit from good supplements, right? That makes perfect sense. Yet, which ones, why, when, how, who? That is the unknown, and it leaves a huge space for misinformation to slip in. I don't like this. Does NOT MEAN these are not good for me or that the lovely person I met yesterday is incorrect or not a superb expert - I'm just saying that my knowledge gap sets me up for misguided behavior (my own). Anyway, I am trying these and I will see what happens. But I worry about those vitamin stores I see on the highway as I'm driving along, that sell hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different little teeny tiny pills for hundreds of thousands of millions and millions of dollars to lots of people. 

Today is a day. Here's how I spent part of my day, which serves as an illustration for the types of days and the type of life that I'm living currently: I cooked an egg, but not quite enough. I put it on a plate, ptrettily, with a tangerine and a banana. I ate it mostly. I decided to pause, and rest my fork, or maybe "decided" is too strong a word, I just had a momentary moment and while trying to put the fork down on the plate (while lazily watching The Today Show on my fancy light colored couch) the fork flipped over, splatting egg yolk all over the couch, then in my haste to rectify the situation, I dropped the plate onto the coffee table where it didn't break (yay) but then my iPhone slipped out of my hand (why was I holding it - I don't know) and it landed face down in the plate in a pool of runny egg glunk. Whatever. Carry on.

Here is the former location of my fancy smart phone:

And now I'm onto another hour, about to go pick up a van full of teenagers and drive them all over town, including someone's house, the hospital, and thundercloud subs. Or something like that. While listening to loud emo electronic music. This will probably be the best part of my day, as well as the most annoying. Lorde have mercy.

What did Virginia Woolf say about the hours? Of which the days are made:

"Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."

This is supposedly from her suicide note to her husband, yet I don't see it this way. Or, I should say, that doesn't bother me at all. I see her words about the hours as wisdom. All we ever have with each other is the second, the minute, the hours and days and weeks and months, all distilled down to one long shimmering memory that goes backwards and forwards. 

Right now the days and nights are all one and are all long. I look forward to a different part of this long day.