Appointment day

Another cafe, another darkening sky in another suburb. I am going to a friend’s for dinner once I’m done with the doctors and MRIs and ultrasounds and a double round of nuclear scans, with great gapes of time to kill in between. A maw wide and empty enough to make me think: all western medicine depends on war. Cancer patients need Molybdenum 99 sourced from outmoded nuclear reactors–it goes to the patient or the weapon, weapons are winning out at the moment (except there is no honesty in that profession–weapons directly, “energy”, indirectly). I’m told have a different isotope fueling the camera’s efforts to light up my organs on film, but it’s all from the same element. A true perversion of a singular truth about medicine in general, buttressed by the technician’s lie: “Don’t worry, the tracer has no side effects”. In any case, I have time to kill until it’s safe to get under that machine again.

This is the coldest damned cafe in all of the greater Toronto north. The snow fell hard here, the door opens wide to gusts and the only thing that keeps me from shivering outright is the stainless thermal coffee cup I brought with me, filled with boiling water so that it acts as a heat source as well as tea. Too scalding hot to drink, but chill-slaughtering when I hold it in my hands. The technician told me to eat something, drink wine before making my way back to the machine. Wine is a disaster with gamma rays.

I made such a fuss about getting ready to come here today. I picked out a cashmere sweater I wish I hadn’t ruined with haplessly applied deodorant, as it would have been warmer. I put on a pin- striped skirt and noticed I’m smaller than I was, it fit me without constriction this time and I thought about all the time that’s passed since I’d worn it last, who I was then. I decided I’d need tights and some lizard shoes with a heel–but that was the height of the absurd, where was I going? I took all of it off and put on khakis and boots.

I don’t know what to wear to this kind of thing. I just want to get in, get it over with, get it done. I can’t stand the amount of time I’m left to spend under an opaque plastic lens or some frigid probe waved by a distracted technician. Its like being buried head first, with your thoughts in crescendo the deeper down you go. And a soundtrack of nothing but swelling minor chords playing in every enclosed space.

I tried hard to keep from crying all day.

Dark Winter Sunday

It feels like I haven’t been out in a year. I haven’t been, though. I never take the opportunity to be out on my own, especially in the evening. But life at home has been dark and samey, to tell the truth, it’s become lonely. So I guess I’m out just listening to the voices around me, looking at books piled on tables, full of self help advice, blazing typography and wild images. Nobody actually writes fiction anymore, it’s all “how to”, “what not to do”, how to avoid the dread of the reality of your life. The “real” literature takes up two table tops in this big box of a store before the covers start to become repetitive, like Warhol screen prints.

I’m drawn to the fluff, myself. High quality picture books on fashion, or inane softcover volumes on how to dress yourself so you don’t look like a free-range ox. Art books marked down in price because they’re written by ghost writers, and not scholars. I’m looking for wit and levity, no one is serious about clothes. I just want to make a sound that shakes open the blinds, lets a little light in.

Secretly, I hoped I would run into an acquaintance here. Years ago, I often used to. I’d see one of my cousins from my mother’s side of the family, the ones who grew up around here, for whom I seem to have upset the order of the universe. I’m being silly about that, they never conveyed such ideas to me but I was a puzzle for them as they were all planning to leave, and yet I actually moved here on purpose. Or, I’d run into a friend from school, Angela, a sweet natured girl who was always brilliant around a prematurely bitter old misfit like me. She married years ago, and moved to Alaska to have babies. Her children are almost teenagers now. I am still mystified when I think of the way she met her husband, but I won’t get into that. Let’s just say it involved the internet, a misdirected filmscript, gender confusion, and an on-a-whim New Year’s eve date in a cabin so cold and so far North trees don’t grow there. Instead, I have a fleeting conversation with a middle-aged Frenchman who is forced to wait for his plain black coffee to be brewed, just as I am. We’re the only people in this barn buying what Dennis Leary used to refer to as “fucking coffee flavoured coffee”. Even the grinders and baristas smell of synthesized cinnamon and eggnog and pie spices, everything needed to make arabica beans smell like Disney’s version of Christmas.

Well, it is the season, after all. Cold sharp winter and darkness that falls early, stays hours longer than it should. Starbucks is already playing Starbucks Label Christmas music (though I have to give them credit as it is December, and long past Hallowe’en).

This time is always the hardest, when fall doesn’t want to let go to winter. Tougher still these days, as I’ve been hiding like the undead for more than a year. I keep pushing my appointment with my doctor back, more out of lack of funds than anything else, but also because there are things I just don’t want to tell. Like the day I knew I wasn’t going to recover, when I could feel every thing inside change irreparably.