Not Yet
Learning to Continue
Every new essay is borrowed time put to good use.
I left the house at 6:45 this morning to be early for an appointment that was never going to be early enough, on a road to Porto that has marked my weeks with remarkable faithfulness since November: motorway, traffic, hospital, blood tests, treatment, the drive home, and then another Wednesday waiting somewhere ahead. After the surgery, that road acquired a new weight. The doctors had seen changes in the bones that might have meant the cancer had spread there. They were careful to call it only possibility and not certainty, though possibility is more than enough for the imagination to work with, and by the time I left home this morning I had already lived that conversation several times over in my head.
I sat in the waiting room with a coat folded over my knees and a book I never opened. By eight I was called in. By ten past eight the future I had spent two weeks preparing for no longer existed.
“Remission,” the doctor said, plainly, the way doctors say important things, already reaching for the next form, and I understood the word immediately, and then everything went black.
