Closed eyes

The thing about not being beautiful is that

no one bends over backwards to impress you
you walk the streets flockless, sans gaggle of drooling sycophants,
passing through life unseen, unnoticed
you see people as they really are
and you must embrace them for their true, crappy selves
lest you dare attempt to summon the strength to tread life's thorny path alone.

The thing about not being beautiful is that

when someone tells you that you are, you don't know whether
you are being manipulated
he has crazily deluded himself into looking past your crooked teeth
a little of both (?)

And find beauty as you may within, outside yourself
the doubt may never be enough to convince you that the only meaning of waking up
and shutting down is
surviving the rigmarole until
the final sleep.

what's in the cards?

Sometimes I breathe easier in Guatemala. Despite the exhaust fumes, the pollution, the sound waves that jar you so much that they might be doing something to your lungs, too, I breathe easier.

I've been having trouble imagining life in the US upon my return. Quiet. Controlled. Infrastructure, punctuality, indoor plumbing. Why have I been in my element for the last three months, where life is so inconvenient in so many ways?

What is it that I leave behind in the US?

What is it that I find in Guatemala?

I don't know. Maybe it's not actually worth thinking about.

I gave away my first deck of tarot cards, now over a decade old. I don't need to read anymore to know what's coming. I don't want to predict the future anymore; I want to write it. And if I check my horoscope, it's only to delight in how dreadfully wrong it is.

Are they our hands?

Anecdotes are worth more than statistics.
A large hot chocolate with almond milk
snakes its way through my small intestines.
The silver-coated canvas stares at me
black outlines of fingers reaching for each other
I painted them.
the colors fermenting in the palette
are still wet
invite me to paint my future

Whole

I am a lone empress
a tall oak
whose roots are connected to the burning core of the earth
seething with enough energy
to crumble the strongest human-made foundation.

Cut down my branches
burn them
strip off my leaves
chill me with a perpetual winter

I will grow back.
Standing on the shoulders of Ceres, Lakshmi, the Virgin Mary,
I will offer you shade,
delicious shade,
in the heat of the summer
even as you destroy me.

Interrupted

The knot has tied itself in my chest
into matted barbed wires that keep me wired

I need no caffeine
because frustration keeps me awake

all I wanted was to craft a love letter
and life gave me no time to breathe
no time to punctuate
no time to pour out my soul and myself in words, words, words

how I long for someone to read them
and to love me for them

in trying to unravel the knot
inadvertently it tightens

I try not to rustle the covers
as I try to snatch a hyphen or a colon
to break up these endless run-on sentences

there are no periods

there are no pauses
so I will struggle to breathe and sing through each phrase until I am red in the face
and then blue

that I could plunge into an underwater refuge and evolve gills
or not
and float dead to the surface

55

You hold out your cell phone, showing me a picture of your motorcycle. It's blue--my favorite color. At first I don't recognize the woman sitting on the bike, grinning at the camera. You've lost about 30 pounds since then. And you've died your hair red--one last time before it starts to fall out.

I tell you that I love your nail polish--teal with that crackle layer on top that I used back in high school. You make it look classy, even in that faded blue hospital gown. You tell me how badly you want to go to the makeup class they're teaching for oncology patients on Monday. I tell you that I hope you feel better soon so that you can go. I really, really hope you can make it.

I say goodbye, and promise to come back soon.

Later, I look at your CT, a mug shot of the cancer growing in your belly. Hidden inside, it managed to move to your liver and lungs before anyone knew it was there. I feel my throat close a little, that heaviness in my chest. I know that we are reaching the end, that there is little more we can offer you. I want to see you on that motorcycle again, your red hair blowing and those teal crackled nails clutching the handlebars, somehow outrunning the cancer.

You're 55. You're so young. It's not fair.

Bricolage

The pain of being used and discarded
Every drop of nectar wrung from my body
lapped up greedily
like magnetic ambrosia
until nothing but a pile of bones remained.
My abandoned skeleton
has now the most insipid of sweetnesses left to offer

My parents' hair has lost its color, not its curl,
but who were all the crows
that perched at the corners of their eyes
and etched the wrinkles into their faces?
What were the sweets and the genes
and the memories
that make their wounds
unable to heal?

An egalitarian whim:
that I were a person
before this gendered body!
whose purity is assessed by penetration
whose virtue is found in the the one at her side
whose potential is realized when the empty space within
forms another gendered body.

Tortuous torrents of fear flow underneath
For there is no operation for cataracts
of the third eye.
What is written
I no longer know

Their shrinking spines,
the vapid sugar of my veins,
my hollow womb, clotting like a hardened heart,
all fill me with unease
my clouded intuition cannot dispel.

Punctuation

Sometimes the silence is too much to bear.

A moment stolen
from intolerable rigmarole,
embodied in my smile:
relief, anticipation, creation
the neurotransmitter floods the synapse like
the dot of the exclamation point the sparkle in my eye
(!)

I could share
this with anyone.
I could.
But breath arrests action
and the mere act of inhaling
is a reminder that life is about accepting
being alone.

Smiling alone is sometimes too strange.

So:
turn on the radio,
listen to that pop song,
envision movement,
suppress the pining for the wish that
loneliness
could be put to rest earlier than
my death.

the streets of my old neighborhood

Tonight I took myself out
and had a vegan mocha cupcake
for dinner.

And then I walked myself home in the dark.
It was a perfect evening
in many ways.

I walked the streets of my old neighborhood
and passed that old house with the cluttered porch.
There are still more chairs
than inhabitants.
It makes me smile.

There is something healing
in putting one foot
in front
of the other.

But I must say
there is a deep ache within me
for that sacred space
where I can exhale
and know I belong.

For now
I will keep walking.

To Remember

To remember is to imagine at a particular moment,
a particular place,
and perhaps
nothing more.

My longitude and latitude may predict hypercognition of grief, anger, betrayal,
the bottomless pit in my left ventricle draining my blood
when my mind conjures up his face,
or his,
or his.

Slovenliness and the historical record join hands to make me into
an archaeologist.
Unearth from a messy drawer
a picture frame with pressed dried flowers
collected from the mountains of Colorado
labeled with genus and species

My nose recalls with ease what my mind does not.
The teasing scent of blue detergent
the comfort of a warm burial in a pile of freshly laundered white shirts
next to someone who adored me

Those milliseconds challenge the veracity of my narratives
that prioritize their vile ways.
How much easier it is when the truth of your disregard for me
does not confront the Truth
of the complexity of human interactions.
The Truth we shall never know.

That I too am remembered
am imagined
am measured by moods
by meaning
by a need to make sense of this life
cannot stop my imperfect memories

so maybe it is better to have none.


--Anita
inspired by Julian Barnes "The Sense of an Ending"

stranger

You are a stranger, even though
I am sleeping at your side, your arm resting on my hip
pulling me closer.
We are breathing in step, hearts aligned, fingers crossed
but even now, I feel so far away.
I am a girl at the bottom of a well, staring up at the sky.
I want you to know that I’m here
trapped in the darkness
but my voice is quiet. It does not carry so well.
I feel like I’m screaming, but I know it's just in my head,
in the way I look at you and hope to see you looking back,
in those ambiguous comments that pass by you like signs to places you have no intention on going.
I need you to ask--
to look down into the well--
to see me.
I don’t want you to join me,
to save me.
No.
Just to recognize that I’m down here
and not just the warm body at your side.

appetite

Inspired by Sarah's latest Wislawa Szymborska post and life.

--

appetite

How easy to love the ones who love us back!
To crawl through the eons that separate face from face,
to fight with such intensity that your wounded
hearts only grow closer on reconciling.

How hard it is to love the ones
who do not love us back,
whose battles become permanent wedges and tight smiles.
How many of them life hands us
until to love becomes
a duty
an obligation
a responsibility.

A weary hand feeding its body
purely out of necessity
with food that lost its taste
long ago.

How this heart craves the flavor
this palate is denied.
How this mind longs for meanings
this throat wishes it could choke down.

Instead,
this shell lives in seas
of cold oatmeal and spoons clinked with haste.
The machine requires sustenance
to keep loving
without receiving
(with a secret hope
that one day
the clouds will thunder into existence
machines who love back).

-Anita
--

thank you note

I owe so much
to those I don’t love.

The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I’m not
the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,
the freedom –
love can neither give
nor take that.

I don’t wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can’t.
and forgive
as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don’t realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them a thing,”
would be love’s answer
to this open question.

-Wislawa Szymborska

pretty sure

I'm pretty sure you exist out there, somewhere. I refuse to believe that a heart would be made to long for someone who does not exist.

I wish you'd introduce yourself soon. I'm getting tired of waiting for you, hoping I'll find you in the eyes of everyone I meet. There's little bits of you in all I see, in all the beauty of the world, in the stories I hear and the stories I tell to my own heart.

I'm looking forward to that moment when I look in your eyes and know that you see me, and that you've been looking for me too.

Until then, I guess I'll just keep my feet on the ground and my eyes to the stars, letting the bits of beauty in each moment overwhelm me.

38 years

I love that look you give him when he's telling stories about you. The way you roll your eyes and snort, telling us how someone's got to set him straight, after all. You've been married for 38 years now, with one son and more memories than you can remember anymore.

You told me that you're scared, and that you wonder if it's even worth fighting anymore. You're afraid that you'll suffer through all these treatments only to find that the cancer remains. All the pain, side effects, uncomfortable procedures--all for nothing. You're more afraid of false hope than anything, afraid of what will be left if the treatments don't work, afraid of the weight of broken dreams, afraid that your heart won't be able to take any more bad news.

But I don't want to let you give up hope. Every time I see you, I want to make you roll your eyes and set that cancer straight.

And I watch your husband tell your stories for you, reminding you each day of the fight you've always had. Every day, even when you refuse to eat or get out of bed or watch the sun go down, he's right there with you.

Yesterday we took you outside to feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair again, for the first time in weeks. I watched you smile as I sat at your side. And I hoped for you. God, how I hoped for you.

The world's buttery sheen

Everyday, I try to find something to be grateful for.

Everyday, I try to create something to be grateful for.

My hiatus from medical school has been strange. I keep breathing in all of the third year emotions of my friends and former classmates: frustration, anger, joy, wonder, exhaustion. It's more negative than positive. Is medicine more negative than positive?

I realized today that if I had done either medicine alone or anthropology alone, I could have been better at them in that nauseating academic way. Sacrifice my soul for higher honors, spend more time in the ivory tower writing publications for 5 people to read and 10 people to skim.

For all my losses, for all my pauses, I am more human.

My sorrows have only led me to kindness, constantly trying to enact it, never knowing how, stumbling, fumbling awkwardly through my phrases and gestures.

Meanwhile, my buttery heart melts and oozes its contents all over my body.

These days, I like to breathe and wait for my thoughts to vanish.

moments

I delivered a baby girl yesterday.

My hands were the first hands to hold her in this world--the first human contact she has ever had outside the womb. It's pretty crazy when you think about it, what a privilege that is.

The other day one of my friends was reflecting on how amazing it is to get to be present for these life-changing moments in the lives of others. To get to be there for those moments that change everything, both the good and the difficult.

But then came the question: are we making the time to be for those moments in our own lives?

Resilience

When I'm in the clinic, part of me is there and part of me is wrapping my head around Arthur Kleinman. This is just a tribute to the humbling stories you get to hear in primary care.

Like the Ukranian woman who survived world war II; whose husband was sent to Siberia when she was pregnant with her first child, never to return; who endured the cold noodles, applesauce, and black coffee of the camps where others asked her how she was so pretty despite that horrible food when everyone else looked so miserable ("I am of good stock," she said); whose second husband, whom she met after coming to the US, promised her an iPad for their anniversary he didn't live to see; whose children remembered and bought her the iPad and got her drunk with joy and alcohol at a dinner overlooking the Mississippi River.

Still going strong in her late eighties, and despite her losses, she is a lively woman who refuses to be crushed by sorrow.



Today was one of the most beautiful October days I've ever felt, and I spent it in a way that a few years ago I thought I might like to. My gray skies are passing clouds, and nothing compared to the pain that these patients have suffered. But you can still drown in a drizzle.

Medicine continually reminds me it is but a drizzle; but I continue to create my own storm to drown in.

Durga

I am a warrior.
I have the strength of the elephant
you imagined I was after you took my tusks and fled.
But I need no tusks to conquer a coward.

I have the power in my bones to decapitate you with my hands alone,
I have the beauty of my skin to seduce a thousand predators,
the cunning to convert them to prey,
I have the love of an elephant's heart to forgive
the wisdom of an elephant's soul to never forget.

I abandoned your elephant on a train;
I have no need for symbols.
And the elephant I gave you
will never be more than a symbol.

A coward with ivory is
still a coward.
My tusks will not protect you as I did.

An elephant without tusks
can still crack a coconut under her foot.

Overtime

You apologize for
the blood on your pants
the fading scars on, the size of your soft white stomach
your thin hair, graying at forty, that would curl if cut short
the cancer that left you with your left breast and an unfinished reconstruction
and then the cancer that stole your right kidney

(Ironic that the left side, the sinister, was so good to you)

You apologize for having dreams
for your mother, who died even when you gave them up
for your guilt
for your pain

in short
you apologize for
existing.

I apologize for
hiding behind a cloak of professionalism that says
I am not allowed to cry with you
I am not allowed to hug you

Instead I tell you
cold water and hydrogen peroxide will get the blood out
Instead I give you
my open eyes and hope you can feel my heart in my irises
Instead I send you
into an empty world where you are not only alone but lonely
an empty world where no one apologizes
but you
and me.

--Anita