2.01.2008

happy anniversary




this Sunday is the 3 year anniversary of my 1st brain surgery.

As much as I desperately want to let it all go, pretend it didn’t happen, feign indifference, I cannot help it, marking time in this way. Looking forward and behind - the brain tumor year the marker, the dividing line, the before and after. Staring backwards at the point in time where time itself began to mean other things. Like gazing at the remnants of a long-fallen alien civilization.

In this sense, bound to this process of re-identification with every moment, I am forever altered (but that’s not so surprising, is it?). the criteria for everyday life has shifted and so in turn other aspects of my own awareness have shifted too. relationships mutate, the worth of random things inverts, distorts, distends. favorite films are stripped of meaning, widely-celebrated books about, say, office life or multiculturalism don’t resonate at all: they wash ashore and i read them but they don’t reach me. they're not written for me. It's like reading history about a parallel world that isn’t even there. Competing fictional accounts of actual things that were built upon other deeper fictions. A complex and massive edifice of sand.

Bells ring and alarms sound and it takes me a moment to discern if it’s in present or past tense. Is this happening? or Did it happen?

Hmm. Does this mean I should get out more? Or less?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It means you should finish that book!! And maybe you should get out more - i.e. spend some time volunteering to help others through their big issues. You've been to the "dark side" and survived - now help others going through it, whether their "dark side" is a brain tumor or something else. You have an understanding & experience that could be invaluable to others.