I Will Reclaim Where I Can and Adapt Where I Cannot

not-quite Journaling, 72

There is a party in my mouth (grapefruit + hope) tastes like victory.

7/2/2024: My cancer treatment is over. I’ve taken my last estrogen blocker. I’m giddy and nervous and grateful and cautiously happy. I celebrated with a grapefruit (all right, with three grapefruits). After six years, tasting (no, devouring!) the citrusy delight was nearly orgasmic. Now, my flesh and bones and spirit and I will work on reclaiming other pleasures cancer treatment has kept from us. I will reclaim where I can and adapt where I cannot.

 

sunflower
on a cloudy day,
what a gift!

7/16/2024: My Piano Man gifted me 13 small journals (yep, he totally enables my 13-is-the-awesomest-number-in-the-multiniverse obsession). I couldn’t decide which to use first (they’re so pretty!). Then the phrase on one of the covers, “We can begin by doing small things…” made my choice for me. Other quotes, carrying similar messages, are scattered on the pages--reminders that tiny ideas are seeds for gigantic doings. I’m trying to find my way again, after so many years of being mostly ill all the time, so I can use all the reminders I can get.  Also, I LOVE starting a new journal! 😁

 

7/18/2024: Because every now and again, people promising help convince themselves that said help looks a lot like the box (cage?) they’ve built of their own beliefs. I hate cages--no matter how pretty (or seemingly well-intended) they might look.  

– for Poets and Storytellers United (Friday Writings #136: “begin by doing small things”)

Some Years “After the Almost-Apocalypse”

A breast
cancer scare hits hard
and fast--twisting, twisting,
twisting… the mind and gut
and leaving the heart feeling

drained, displaced, desolate. 

Those terrible days
(the ones that snail by
while your world is waiting,
waiting, waiting… to learn
if life is really rotting
inside the walls of your being)
those days are soul eaters.

But after
the almost-apocalypse is done,
when healers chant,
“You’re fine. You’re just fine”,
your world grows less bleak--
flesh and blood and bone exhale,
and the spirit blossoms

(differently) anew.

 

 

Daisy Sunshine by LoopyLady

- someone asked me, “Are you excited to get back to your normal life now that breast cancer is gone?” I told them that I wasn’t sure ‘getting back to normal’ was a realistic option for me. Later, after I had some time to think, I sent them a quote from Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, to explain that after breast cancer, ‘it’s like your life breaks into a million pieces and when you put them back together, they don’t quite fit exactly the same.” Surviving (and thriving after the Breast Cancer Monster), requires hope, determination, self-love… and enough creativity to craft ourselves a new normal.

- I wrote the first version of this poem years ago; time has changed bits of it (and me).

– for Poets and Storytellers United (Friday Writings #134: It’s a Dirty Job)