I can't tell if this feeling is that I have something still that I need to do, or that I am trying to find something to do to leave behind. Tonight is the first night in a while I have genuinely felt the darkness, felt like it was so close beyond nothing more than a veil, a comfortable mystery, a great adventure. Telling my husband how often I felt that way was maybe the last night until tonight that death felt close, either just under the floor or over my shoulder. As I say that the wall starts creaking, and a momentary fear makes me cling back into life. As much as the heaviness inside me wants to deny it sometimes, I do cling, I have some amorphous feeling of desire to be, just as vague a mist as any other feeling I have, and just as concrete. I don't think it's any desire to justify my not-being-dead, more of just trying to find any kind of point or something to show for it. In my opinion, there is no justifying my existence against what I go through to maintain it. My continued living has not felt for my own enjoyment, but if it has not benefited anyone else, then it truly was an exercise in futility, in torturing myself. If there was some art, or some thought, some image I could leave that would bring any modicum of joy or comfort that would last longer than any awkwardness, pain or resentment I will inevitably leave in my wake.

It feels really sick to feel both relieved and resentful that my husband isn't bothered to know that his wife detests living. Oftentimes I regret marrying; it's something I've often wondered if I'd ever do it at all. Because he seemed unbothered by my troubles, maybe I felt like I wasn't so inflicted on him. Like most other things, I could wash over him and leave no trace. But then I realize how alone I feel. How un-cared for. And the perversion of how nice that feels sometimes.

Somebody once asked why I keep living. Why? Why? My answer was the thoroughly depressing, "Why not?" Usually meant in an encouraging way... why not stop for ice cream? Why not get the red instead of the blue? Why not take a few days off? You have the vacation days saved up! No. Why not stay alive? Nothing actively drawing away, because I know leaving abruptly will accomplish nothing. The lasting impression would be sadness, tragedy, unrequited longing for a purpose. Perhaps that is mostly why I long to leave something behind... not to justify the pain I am going through, or to explain it or attempt to make sense of it, but to make some kind of positivity out of it. I don't think I'm so special that my attempt would be any good, but it would feel better to be hit by a bus or blown up at a time when I had something going, something I was reaching for, something that people could look at and know I really was enjoying myself here and there, and that I wanted them to know I was okay.

Alive

I was trying to decide if I recognized the echoing introduction to the song Spotify had chosen to play for me when a meek and familiar voice rippled through my car.

"I tremble
tremble
tremble
tremble....."

It had been years since I had listened to Metric, and I had never listened to it on Spotify, so it was an honest and organic choice made by my Discover Weekly playlist. I had stopped listening to Metric and many other artists I was enjoying at the time years ago because they had become associated with the period of time in which I was a 24 year old with a breast tumor.

Here was this song, and I was simultaneously recalling the lyrics as they trailed through my car's interior. The straining pain in my chest that I had been carrying for weeks made my sternum ache as I heard my symptoms sung to me.

"Help, I'm alive.
My heart keeps beating like a hammer.
Hard to be soft, tough to be tender.
Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train.
Help, I'm alive.
My heart keeps beating like a hammer."


Metric, Metrik, Muse, Silversun Pickups... I never listened willingly to LaRoux, but that also fell solidly into this realm of music, this soundtrack to my early 2013. I had not listened to any of these artists since then, and here they all are, present in this week's Discover Weekly. Together. It is by no means a complete list of music of that time, but it's enough that it became increasingly surreal as they cycled through the playlist I didn't plan on that drive home from work. By the time Knights of Cydonia made it on, the windows of my car were rolled down and I was leaning heavily into my hand, my elbow propped up on the inside of my door.

On this date four years ago, I was just a couple of days away from the surgery to have my breast tumor removed. At 5'9" tall, my weight had dwindled down to 115 pounds. What felt like a rock in my breast now constituted a significant portion of it. Upon removal it was well over "golf ball" size, venturing into "egg" proportions inside my tiny boob. Before the procedure, a "friend" of mine called me to chat, and upon hearing of my health situation, he told me that at least if it was cancer "people won't be sad for very long if you die". He then described a metaphor about human lifespans being like those of flies, tiny and meaningless in the scheme of the universe. We don't talk any more.

At the time, I thought that this chapter of my life was some dramatic brush with mortality, but looking back it looks like just another of life's hazing rituals. "Adulthood is looking both ways to cross the street and getting hit by an airplane," said an image macro my sister put on Facebook once. Growing up is just hurting in new and humiliating ways, and forgetting how to cope with ones you've already dealt with a thousand times.

Still, the pain I've been carrying for the past few weeks has been distinctive in a way that I feel like I should take a moment at some point to be eloquent and articulate it (but this is not that time). It was only last week that I was finally able to word it to somebody in such a way that they (he, my husband) repeated it back to me in a way I understood. In trying to explain it to friends, it always came back something like, "Oh yeah, I'm a total worry wart. What you need to do is not worry about anything purple monkey dishwasher." I told my husband, "There's no specific worry that's upsetting me. It's like the fog I get when I have depression, only this is just doom, and there has been a constant pain in my chest that feels like what happens when you're having a dream and you slip off a cliff, only it never resolves itself or goes away. I'm constantly missing that extra stair, going *gasping noise*."

After that drive home, that particular straining in my chest is gone. My chest still hurts, but with a dull ache I am more or less accustomed to. My heart still races, but not as quickly. The hummingbird in my chest is now a sparrow, is the dumb way I want to say it. I still wonder what will get me up tomorrow, how I will get home, who I will be to who I see and who sees me. But it hurts less, and it feels less urgent. Like the answers to all those questions are already here, and I maybe don't need to consciously know them to act them out.

I don't feel like I need to beg for help any more. It's just I'm alive.

Little Talks

We had been dating for close to a year, or at least we had met each other almost a year ago. It took a few months for any labels to develop, but the weekend we met was the first of infinite consecutive weekends together. Anyway, this particular night we wound up in a dark, moody bar not  far from his townhouse. I had never been inside this one yet despite our thorough exploration of the different drinking venues in the area almost each and every weekend. The darkness might have been accentuated by a thick haze I had been developing for the past 12 hours, starting with our "pregame" lunch before the beer festival.

Of Monsters and Men's "Little Talks" came wafting into the room, buoyed by the thick atmosphere of fairy lights and my own pleasant buzz. I complained to him that as much as I liked the song, it reminded me of a very irritating person from their country of origin.

"It is a good song, though," he said fairly, always pragmatic and just. A sudden grin took over his usually placid face. "We should sing it karaoke some time."

"You'd sing karaoke?" I said skeptically.

"Sure!" he chirped, as if it was an obvious proposal and as if he was not the most introverted person I had ever met in my life.

Two years later, we were newly weds on our third (third? third.) night of marriage. We had been wandering the bars of San Francisco between Union Square and Chinatown. The wind and rain had driven us into a swanky coffee shop that, like many other hip establishments in the city, seemed to only play "indie" hits from five years previous at the most recent. Ladytron's "International Dateline" gave way to "Little Talks" as we decided to start commuting to the next bar.

We followed a very stylish chihuahua and his man-bunned handler out onto the sidewalk and back into the solid wall of wet dog smell that seemed to permeate the entire bay area. "Little Talks" still lingered in my head.

"Do you remember saying we should karaoke that song? I think it was after our first beer fest together."

He chuckled, "Yeah, and we still can. I think I know the lyrics better than most people."

I started singing gently:

"Cuz though the truth may vary this-"
and he chimed in with me,
"ship will carry our bodies safe to shore."

We linked arms, our free hands holding our matching cold-brew coffees as we trundled down the hill to our next destination.