Expanding

I was going to write about my brush with skin cancer. I had a few paragraphs — told myself I would get back to it, round out a crisp three page reflection on the brief dramatic episode that left me so shaken, so newly appreciative of each day, that upon coming out the other side I bought a house and quit my job. It was poetic — a mole, perched delicately on my breast, shaped I-shit-you-not like a sweet little cartoon heart, which threatened to kill me and settled for maiming my body, leaving me lopsided and besmirching my femininity forever. Amidst the shock and the sadness I could concede that it felt literary; nuanced; tidy.

But once again came the chemical smells of a hospital, the tangle of machines that began with a single IV and became a cobweb, a shroud. I didn’t have time to dwell on one near-death experience before another, like the second in a set of waves, rose, crested, sent me churning in the newly familiar brine.

They say the big ones come in sets of three. I tread water with narrowed eyes, shallow breath.

This time, a tumor. It carved out not a scoop of breast but instead of organs. A tumor — longer, my surgeon claimed, than a ruler, and fatter than a cantaloupe. My meager covid weight gain, a minuscule, barely-there belly, had in fact been a slowly ballooning alien progeny that swelled silently until one sudden morning, when its entanglement with my fallopian tube pulled just taut enough to twist my ovary around on its stalk to a position of full, agonizing torsion.

The growth was benign, a nurse phoned to inform me several days after my emergency surgery. No cancerous cells detected within its enormity. Benign, save for its murder of my ovary and fallopian tube. I thanked her, not having known that cancer was even a possibility.

I insisted to friends and colleagues — to anticipate and rebut the shame, the assumptions — that I had hardly been waddling around like a pot bellied cartoon, had only ever looked my regular thin self in the same old skinny jeans, perhaps just a hair tighter. My organs, then, for the most part, must have simply been squished up into my ribcage. Now I picture them floating freely in a sudden abundance of space, like vegetables drifting in a bowl of watery soup. Shuffling around in my socks, I swear I feel them bumping about inside my newly cavernous interior, deciding where to settle.

I now concede that I had complained, in preceding months, of a certain sort of fullness. I wrote it in a poem:

To me it’s always

Been described

As emptiness but

Lately all this longing

Has me feeling full

Of someone else’s

Elbows and knees

Heavy like a

Coffee cup

Printing rings

On a newspaper

Staining

All the words

Perhaps I was mistaken in the origin of my inner crowdedness — or perhaps not.

One of my favorite authors once wrote that the half-life of love is forever. On my plodding neighborhood walks, the incision scabs on my belly crinkling like paper, I ponder the claim. I believe it to be true. I have never stopped loving anyone, really; the love has changed color perhaps, lowered its volume, but it’s there. Loving someone new has never meant replacing my gratitude for the one who came before. It has always only ever meant an expansion of my capacity to love.

I picture my heart, heaving and bulbous against my ribcage, lurching into enormity with each new loved one I acquire.

Is that what made me sick? What keeps making me sick, over and over, with cancer scares, tumors — my cells, crushed beneath the weight of my foolish, monstrous heart, growing ever more flawed and defective?

The great injustice of course is that despite my vast collection of loves, I spent my day in the emergency room alone. Simmering in a haze of morphine and dilaudid, wondering if I was about to die and knowing not yet of what, my thoughts grazed limply over the thought of an ex, that he might be moved to come be at my side. The brief fantasy brought me no comfort due to the dull certainty that he would not.

Should this happen again — I brace for the third swell — my only chance of avoiding a similarly lonely stay is to expand my heart once again, snap my ribs from the inside. Break myself just enough to find someone to put me back together.

Expand. Swell. Salty eyed.

These are not the literary and tidy musings of a person newly-robbed of a heart-shaped mole. My humors heave like the sea — they are as confused as my metaphors. The surgeon warned me that my cycle would be “complete chaos” for the first month, with sweeping hormone fluctuations atop the regular emotions that come with losing half of one’s fertility before age thirty. I ride the current and cling only to myself.

This is not my first set of waves. I was born broken, the muscles in my body not right and my immune system programmed backwards. My abdomen is riddled with surgery scars — what’s a few more? To suffer a disfiguring cancer scare; to survive one of the most physically painful experiences a woman can have, come out the other side with two fewer organs, and only miss two days of work; these are things that most folks don’t deal with, and which I have learned to quietly tolerate while presenting myself as “normal.” Pieces of my body may be cut away, but I refuse to carve pieces from my life — I work, I socialize, I live and I love, knocked underwater and gasping up to demand air again, again, again.

At times I think I must be fueled by pure indignation, pure outrage at the unfairness. At other times I think I am fueled by nothing at all, somehow staggering on regardless. Because really, what else is there to do?

And so I paddle forward between sets of waves, a little more broken each time, seeking the lover who will fill the plastic hospital chair because they feel that the latest, most diminished version of me yet is somehow enough.

But I persist. Without my lucky little cartoon heart, but carrying all my loves. Expanding, as my insides settle. Expanding as I shrink.