Warning, this post is graphic

Hard, hard dreams last night.

Piera was kissing someone in bed next to me.  Then I flew around (that part was good).  Then I was at an opera theater trying to get away from the bad guys.  They had gotten one lady already - they would slowly disfigure her hands, one finger at a time.  They would cut it off, wait for it to heal and for her to resume her life and then start cutting at the next one.  She was sobbing as she showed me her gory swollen excoriated hands, and cried out "they won't give me a drain" - they wouldn't install a drain in the wound, so it ended up closing while unhealed.  Then the wound would swell and the pus and infection would explode it back open.

I cried again today.  Somewhere along the line (like, in teenage years) it became almost impossible for me to cry alone, so every time I achieve it is worth noting.  Somehow I need to be held and seen by someone else to feel safe enough to cry.  Scared of my own grief, I guess.

My Mom pointed out that I am the lady at the opera.  I see Piera tomorrow, to learn just how much kissing of someone else is going on, and how and why she walked out so suddenly.  I guess it feels like another finger is being cut off.  I'm sorry if that sounds dramatic and weird.  This is just a description of where the wild things are as I see them.  So all I can do is try to open a drain in the wound, and let it ooze into the pillow with my tears and snot and funny looking crying face.

There were all the other women, and then there was Piera.  (I said it like that when I was with her, so we can know it's true.)  This relationship, unlike all the others, was built on mutual compatibilities, shared experiences, trust, and a whole lot of like.  I've loved a lot of women, but liked and trusted far fewer, oddly.  And Piera was the first person who I felt saw me as me, the real me, and loved that me, and would stay and stay, and stay.

And I was wrong.

Nothing to do now but try to cry, and wait as well as I can for tomorrow.

I don't want this post to end on a falsa happy note, because today is a truly tough day.  But it is worth noting that in this dream, as well as one I had the day after I found out what had happened with Piera, I flew.  In both of these flying dreams, navigation was the question.  In both of them I had a navigation apparatus that I ignored/didn't know how to use/didn't work, and in both of them I was able to steer around properly and land safely when and where and how I wanted.  Both landings were on a beach.  HMMMM!

Tears

So tears came for me tonight, great gutted wrenching howls that probably terrorized the whole neighborhood.  I don't want to say too much about it, just that it was sacred, and scary, and I lived through it by myself, without calling out for help.

Househunting on the cheap in the Bay Area

Things I like: 

• Quiet streets
• Yellow houses
• Yellow kitchens, also white, or blue.
• Laminate or hardwood floors
• Yellow (or white or blue), sunny kitchens with hardwood floors (duh!)
• Tile floors also
• Big, bare yards (blank slate!)
• Big windows
• Open spaces
• No neighbors!  Or few of them, and quiet - like I have now.
• A place for the Leopard to roll around in the sun and show her chubby pink belly to the sky
• A short, predictable commute to work.  1/2 hour, just long enough to eat breakfast and assemble my mental armor.
• Green houses.
• Pink houses.
• A place where I may consider transferring the decomposing body of sweet sacred Georgia Brown.
• A place where I feel safe OR a place cheap enough that I reserve some money for a big fence and an alarm.  But preferably the first.
• A place where I can lie with no shirt on in the clean sunny dirt (see above).
• Having a vegetable garden.
• Not having to freak out about locking up my bicycle in maximum-security solitary confinement.
• Blue houses (a nice blue, or blue and white.  Not the depressing, dull, poverty-grey-blue.)

Things I do not like:

• Grout.
• Having to move at all.
• Having to weigh my safety vs. my privacy vs. hours in the car every day vs. sunlight.
• Grey houses, or brown, or a weird, deranged pastel that is mostly dirt.
• Carpet, especially if/when it is old and disgusting.
• Neighbors with pitbulls.
• Neighbors with un-neutered, uncared-for pets of any kind.
• Being single (so far.  To be fair it has only been three weeks).
• Knowing I will probably get out-maneuvered by counter-offers or cash investors even if it's a property I *don't* love.
• Sitting in traffic for the hours I will end up doing if I get a place I can afford (one hour each way every day).  Achy back, no food, polluting my sweet sweet world.
• Jumping awake in the middle of the night wondering if someone is breaking in (not looking forward!)
• Seeing people on meth or other drugs twitching near the house I'm looking at.
• Condos where there is someone above you, below you, and to either side.
• Small, concrete patios with no sun.
• HOA dues of $300 at least.
• Places that smell or feel like urine, smoke, or anger and hopelessness.
• Looking at my current home with an eye to what’s mine, what’s hers, and what has to go.
• All this, really.  

I am grateful, of course.  Not of course, like it's a given.  I am grateful, simply, punto y final.  I have my health (no cancer!), safety, a clean, safe home while I figure out what is next.  None of that is to be discounted and plenty of women do not have any of those.  And please, say a prayer for those who do not.  (Goddess protect them, those who do not.)

But I still have my own unique experience which is that I. Hate. This.  I did not want it, and I do not like it.  I had built the life I longed for, my co-builder jumped ship, and now I need to cast about and look for the next shore.  (I don't care if that is a mixed metaphor, it works for me).  I can do it, and I will, but I don't have to like it, and I don't.  Now.  On to see the next listing.  

Question night.

On some level I don’t believe it, can’t believe it, don’t even want to write about it and take that one step closer to admitting that it is true.

I watch the door, thinking she will walk through it, expect to see her truck filling up half of our carport, I can’t come to terms that Piera won’t be at her post on the couch, in our bed, in my life.

Who walks away like this?  Who leaves their toothbrush and their shoes, their bicycles and their protein powder, their alarm clock and their facial cream?  Who steps neatly out of a life that two people built, together?

I don’t know.  And that’s a big part of the question for which right now, there may not be an answer.  Really? (the question goes) – the answer, is obviously, yes.  Yes, or I wouldn’t have been on the biopsy table alone, wouldn’t have spent these nights in tears, wouldn’t even be writing this, right now.  So if really, yes, and it seems like so, then how?  When did it start?  How much of our love was real?  Where was the lie?  What was the mechanics of you walking away, of the toothbrush left in sink and the lonely pillow by the bed?  When did the rot begin and how much of what we built was to last?  Any of it?  None?  Some untrustworthy middle ground in between?

And once through the how and the why and the which was a lie, then who?  You?  How can I trust again, knowing I was so placidly, incredibly, wrong?  Who have I lived with all these years, where is she now, what does that leave me with for a future?  You?  The one I could finally trust, at long last different, done right, in addition to plenty of love, a whole lot of like, you?  YOU?  

On some level I don’t believe it, can’t believe it, life without my Bun, how could this possibly be true?

Pixie Cut

In some cultures cutting off your hair is a way to separate yourself from grief or loss.  Or maybe I made that up but I think my Mom said it to me once, and it has always made sense in a visceral way.  Piera used to cut my hair, long sweet morning (well, my morning, anyway) sessions with just my pajama pants on, sitting on the plastic chair in the sunny fenced back yard, big ole towel ‘round my neck, chatting away.  “Look up?”  “Now, look to the side.”  Over time she got really good at it and we bought her some special scissors.  As months morphed to years and dozens of haircuts, I sometimes felt bad – a hairstylist, in addition to the millions of other ways she supported me and kept me whole?  But those haircut times were always so sweet.  The rest of the day after a haircut she would evaluate me with a coolly professional eye.  “Damn, I did a good job.”  And she almost always did.  On the few occasions that she was busy and I went to a salon, she would be accusatory, jealous, even!  And they rarely made me look as good as she did.

Heart-burnt tree.
Joseph D. Grant County Park, San Jose.

So I got my haircut today (of course), found a place on Yelp and went in and asked for a Pixie cut in honor of my friend the Perfessor and the rarity of a blue moon.  The lady took her time, but there was no warm backyard chair or big bath towel, no appraising Piera eyes, no cat to flop around on the ground, no wind to blow away my fluff.  No Pixie cut either, and the clouds have covered the rare blue moon – just a short, short, short trim, the better to chase away grief with, I guess.  Curls shorn, I feel lost, cut off from one more connection, as I sit alone in the empty house tonight.  

In which I do not have cancer...

Today I got “The Call” but plenty of other women didn’t, or they did, but didn’t hear what they desperately wanted to hear.  And so in one sense my path split off from my sisters – the umpire swung his hands and hollered “safe!”  But I have seen the ugly underbelly, and I know that I am not truly safe.  Nor are you, or you, or you or you or you.  There is a kinship, still, and my bruises have not yet faded.   I won’t forget these days of sisterhood, bound by the breast, the needle and our curious vulnerability.  But I am glad, so relieved, such a deep unwinding, that going forward I have heartbreak, but I am not, right now, facing cancer.  

After I got The Call and staggered through the rest of my day, I asked if anyone wanted to go to dinner and my new friend Patti Berryhill said yes because she has to celebrate a new job and so we went.  Her boyfriend Steve was there and we all talked about how I don’t have cancer but do have a divorce (next time I’ll just get officially married, then, since a breakup like this is a divorce whether you got to have a big party with presents or not) and how she is going to make $6600 more a year with more vacation days but have a longer commute and it was nice to fold my troubles into the larger fabric of life.

Patti’s boyfriend is a musician so after dinner we wandered over to the Fox Theater where they have the Wednesday night Redwood City Blues Jam and went in.  Patti is very sweet and introduced me to all her friends, but mostly I sat and watched the musicians, which I love to do.  I love how they grimace and twitch and sway, hunch over, splay out, I love how the music comes through them so strongly that they could. care. less.  what they look like or if they are cool or sexy in any given moment.  And so for those moments, I didn’t think of anything but that, transported by those, themselves transported by music.

I will become someone different.  I don’t know who she will be, what she will like to do.  What hours will she keep?  When will she come home and what will home look like?  It’s not a huge concern of mine right now, but I am definitely kind of curious.  Right now it’s wine o’clock, as it has been for so many hours lately (oops).  I am cancer-free, to the best of my knowledge, and that’s all I need to know.

Sky, Edgewood County Park.
Photo by m. sachs martin (I can't make the accent on my laptop).

Kin

Here in biopsy never-never land, I feel certain kinships with all the other women who must be going through this (I feel kinship with everyone who has dealt with divorce, too, but We Aren’t Thinking About That Right Now).

It’s unnerving to know how many other women right now are driving, or writing, or working, or sleeping with their sweet, soft sacred breast gouged up and bruised by the biopsy needle.  Make no mistake about it, this is not a “feminine” process in the stereotypical pink fuzzy sense of the word.  It’s hard and gasping and bloody, it shoves and stabs and requires all your musculature to brace up on that table.  And how many women have how many left or right breasts aching quiescent or oozing blood under their polo or t-shirt or blazer as I write this?

And how many women are in the agony of hurry up and wait?  How many went through the undignified, unofficial support group in the Kaiser basement, us strangers in our gowns like kids outside the principal’s office, trading strategy and comfort while the radiologist called us in one by one and delivered either a pardon… or a detention to the next procedure?  How many are checking Facebook and email when we all know the news will come by phone, but it is restless and relentless, this need to know, to see, are we there yet, will I live?  News, is there news, any news yet?  Did anybody say something?  Can anybody help?

Deer behind barbed wire.
Edgewood County Park, San Mateo.  Yes, it's symbolism, ok?

And yes I know there’s a good chance it’s not cancer and even if it is there are many good options and choices.  I know that.  But with a bruised body and mind I can just sit, helpless and numb, while I wait, with my sisters, a legion of wonderers, an army of bruises, a worldwide wave of held breath until that phone call finally comes.