from the anchor (II)

There's a rhythm to my madness, a point to my routine. On the days I go into work later in the morning, I try my hardest to make it to The Anchor: a cup of coffee, sometimes some eggs and toast, or some cottage cheese with crackers. I like to come here and write, to read, to think. I've filled maybe six or seven college-ruled notebooks with my rants & ramblings, with my confessions and fears, my doubts and hesitations. Many of these writings have found their way onto this blog at some point or another, but more than half remain known only by the notebooks and myself. These precious hours at the Anchor serve as just that: an anchor. I give myself time to think through my thoughts, time to piece together all the disjointed ideas tumbling about in this strange brain of mine.

If anything defines the last three months, it's one word: stress. Mostly the stress has been due to the uncertainty of my health, though I'm getting better at that. The lymph nodes seem to be smaller; and if not smaller, they certainly haven't grown. It may very well be the case that there's nothing at all wrong with them, that they're just big. It happens sometimes. That's a best-case scenario; a worst-case scenario, well, I don't even know what that would be. Not cancer, which was my earliest and gravest concern (thanks to the eager pronunciations of a government-fed doctor): the nodes don't carry the characteristics of lymphoma, and I'm not presenting any other symptoms associated with it. The stress of all that, however, has done a number on me. Like most of my family, I carry my stress in my shoulders, neck and back. My muscles are tense, they ache. Sometimes I feel like an old man, to be entirely honest. I'm not suffering alone: most people I've told about my stress have the same things going on with them. It seems everyone's stressed about something or another this summer. I'm very thankful that I haven't had any panic attacks this month. I think that's worthy of celebration.

The reality is, I feel different since May. I don't really know what it is, or even how to explain it. I look back on those days before the unfortunate cancer diagnosis, and then I look at these days now, and there's a change in tempo, a change in mood. It's like someone's taken my life and colored it a darker lens. I feel like I'm living life in black-&-white while I know that it's meant to be lived in color. I feel empty, barren, poured-out and stretched-thin. It's a lifeless, dull feeling. I feel like nothing more than a lost person in a sea of people headed to their own definite but uncertain demise, like we're all running around and trying to live the best we can while keeping at bay the knowledge that one day it'll end, we'll die, we'll be forgotten. I've thought a lot about death lately, about what it'd be like. Of course, one's worldview paints the answer, because no one really knows what death is like, because those who have undergone it completely haven't come back to tell us. Really, we have no reason to fear it more than we do to seek it. It's a mystery, the final mystery, an unsolvable mystery. "What lies on the other side?" We all have answers: some say nothing, others say everything. Some say there's nothing but torment the other side of death, others nothing but paradise. Really, we don't know, and we're left to our opinions. But all this aside, this appalling cloud of darkness that's settled over me since May may have some good fortune to it, but we will see that only in time.