Formulaic

The waiting room at Sloan-Kettering was a Petri dish for the breeding of new strains of feeling, and love washed up like a red tide. My certainties were unstable. My emotions tumbling through an embarrassing alchemy where jealousy and love made hate, and hate, pity, and fear of loss made love again. Realizations like the rampant glittering of microbes. The destructive over-propagation of our own nuclei, and health and sickness just a matter of proportion.

Your father is in Hong Kong. He is in Tokyo. By long-distance telephone, he pays the bills, which have more zeros on them than I will ever own.

I pester, I spread my fear over a number of doctors and nurses. She’s fine. The tests will take time. She’s watching TV, she’s eating, she’s sleeping (she’s doing better than you). She laughs a lot, she’s brave.

Waiting tables at night, sleeping in the waiting room until dawn. Waiting, testing, waiting with one plaster hand, its words snapped off at the metacarpals. Fear isn’t fear when it lasts this long. The soul stretches out like gum between a shoe and the sidewalk, much farther and thinner than you’d think it would go. Waiting, always and forever waiting, and everything I ever felt for you became please don’t die. Your cancer was my recovery.

The weeks add up. They signify, because if this isn’t love, then why am I sleeping on burlap chairs in stale air bleached by fluorescent lights? I feel terror. It must be love.