My favorite chair
became a receptacle
of me,

which became
a receptacle
of light,

reaching your eyes.

Staring out my bedroom window
just a few days after chemo,
little did I know it would be my last,
that my run through pain was about to pass.

A wedge of dusty light pinned my head back
against the back of my chair from ‘Bob’s’,
like an ax-wedge of grace
it pierced the top of my head.

I couldn’t move.

My eyes hovered like orbs in the flickering light.

“remember what I told you,” said something
that I like to say was “feeling with language.”

Yes, I’ve heard it before- once.

The day I was diagnosed. It said: “Spend as much time as you possible can with other people.” It worked; my solution to the awful pain was simple but genuine contact with others.

And here was the voice again, this time, it brought a friend: A certain dusty light filling my body with light.
The light, as it washed down my arms and torso, froze me. I began to think and feel nothing.

I began to flicker like the light itself. And then I melted into a seeping bag of tears on the floor, on my knees, begging for something, reaching out for a courage I didn’t have, for the courage to stop treatment, to stop the madness.

Many nights crammed themselves into a few hours.

As dawn found me on the floor, the other light had gone. My body was on fire and I found my mother in the living room knitting on the couch.

She barely had time to look up at me before it rushed out of me like a river, a river on fire.

“I can’t do this anymore!! I can’t do treatment!” I fell to her lap and dissolved like a single raindrop over a fire.

She prayed with me and all I felt was sorrow mixed with a kind of confused freedom.

It was the first day of my life.