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.