Travel

Today—or is it yesterday by now?—I briefly had the post-visitor blahs, that feeling you get when visitors leave and you actively feel their absence. My friends from DC, one of whom I met in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot when I was 16 years old, were in New York last night to play a show. I used to see their band all the time when we all lived in Columbus, Ohio. I see them often enough now where I gave them keys to my apartment with a keychain that says “Best Couple Ever.”

I had my blahs only for about 15 minutes, after I handed off the keys to the friend of a friend who is staying in my apartment for the next few days and left to go exploring and I finished packing. It’s my turn to be the visitor now. I’m headed to Dublin as I type, to see my best friend. She’s lived in Ireland since right after college and did grad school there.

It’s so different from the first time I visited, when I was 22. My heart had been broken, and I decided on a whim to visit her. I booked a trip on Expedia and when I went to call call her, I learned she and some other long-term residents had been asked to moved from the hostel where she was staying. She hadn’t told me, I found out later, because her mom regularly called me for updates, and I am a terrible liar. She didn’t want her mom to worry as to her whereabouts. (And her mom had been calling me, wondering where she was.)

So I found myself with tickets to Ireland and no way to contact her, until I remembered the name of the pub where she worked. I rushed home from work to use my landline for long distance. The bartender answered. I said I was looking for my friend, but he replied she wasn’t in yet. “OK,” I said. “Can you give her a message for me? Can you tell her Josie is coming to visit next week?”

“Right, Josie’s coming,” he said.

“Oh, can you also tell her to call her mom?” I asked.

He laughed.

“Have you not been calling your mother?” the bartender scolded her when she arrived to work. “Oh, and Josie’s coming next week.”

These tickets were booked not too long ago. I didn’t have a return flight for a few days. I would say cancer makes me more impulsive now, but only a little bit. It more or less gives me the excuse to be more myself.

I’ve mentioned this before but there are pretty much high highs and low lows with my life for the past few years. The past few weeks have been weird. One of my cats has been sick. Last week looked grim, but he’s responding to medication. Still, for a few days before I left, he wasn’t quite out of the woods. I made the decision to board him at the vet, where they can straighten out his medications and keep an eye on him. It’s the right decision but my heart broke this morning as he curled up around my neck and purred and put a soft paw on each side of my face, blissfully unaware of my impending departure. When I corralled him into his carrier, one of the other cats sat on his carrier as if to keep me from taking his buddy. It was a moment of solidarity, an “I am Spartacus” moment.

While at the vet saying goodbye to him, I was sad to leave the cat but excited to see my friend and her family in Dublin. From there we’re going to Spain, one of my favorite places in the entire world. I’ve been there when I was four, when I was 16, and in my 20s, and I’ve always vowed to go back.

Then I’m going to pop over to Copenhagen for barely two days to see one of my friends. I met him on a street corner in downtown Columbus years ago. I had actually seen him in my apartment at least once before, when I lived with a mutual friend, so his face was vaguely familiar, but we ended up living in the same neighborhood and working near each other so I would see him at the grocery store and on the bus, sometimes giving him a hey-we-kind-of-know-each-other nod of acknowledgement. I had forgotten my gym shoes that day and was walking home early. As I neared a street corner, our paths intersected. “Who are you?” he asked me. “I see you everywhere.” We walked back to our neighborhood together and have been friends ever since.

I try to do so much and I feel like everything is a whirlwind. This time on the plane is full of stolen moments. I watched a whole movie without doing anything else. I am catching up on writing.

Today—it’s definitely yesterday now—I opened the carrier and kissed my cat’s nose and promised to be back soon. I wish sometimes that all the beings I like and love lived in the same place, but that’s not how it is. I lived in Ohio for so long but people moved away, then I moved to New York, and then people left from New York. My heart aches sometimes when I have to say goodbye to people again and again, but I know I am lucky to have so many people I care about and so many people who care about me, spread throughout the globe.

I keep also making new friends, and for that I am also grateful. Without the spreading out of my favorite people, I wouldn’t have more adventures. I wouldn’t be on a flight to Dublin or visiting Copenhagen. I wouldn’t be going to Nashville next month. I wouldn’t have some people who live in Louisiana who I met in Cuba earlier this year staying with me. I wouldn’t have a riot grrl weekend of back-to-back L7 and Bikini Kill shows with high school friends visiting me next month.

I wouldn’t feel the bittersweet feeling of leaving my cats with the excitement of a vacation. I’m also grateful that when it’s time to return home, it’s to my favorite place in the entire world.

The Return of the Kraken

Almost exactly two years ago, on Record Store Day, I had a liver ablation to get rid of what they thought could be my last neuroendocrine tumor. (It wasn’t.) My ex went out that day to a beer event and to a show, and he took my beloved Kraken Rum umbrella, complete with tentacle handle, that I got at a media event. Only one of them came back that night.

It wasn’t my umbrella.

I called the bar and music venue. Friends offered to look. The umbrella was gone. My ex said the umbrella was hard to hold anyway.

My friend gave me her Kraken umbrella as a replacement. Another friend sent me an octopus tentacle pen.

Then, a few weeks ago, a friend who sometimes works at the music/event venue texted me a photo and asked, “Hey, is this your umbrella?”

There it was, in coat check.

It was as if it sensed it was time to return to me.

These past couple of years have been rough. I was told I would always have cancer. I had a traumatic 40th birthday. I almost died and for five months, until the new PRRT treatment, I watched myself deteriorate with no relief in sight. A 12-year-relationship ended. Something I had hung hopes on for six years evaporated in the course of 48 hours, and it hurt so much that the weight would pin me into bed some mornings.

Yet, I’m happy. It seems like every time something knocks me down—hard—I have to pick myself up, dust myself off and keep going, even if I am wounded or limping. (Sometimes, as was the case this week, literally.) “I don’t have time to be sad,” I explained to my friend who let me stay with her after my breakup and first PRRT treatment, when I was radioactive. I just don’t have much time. Months. Maybe years. I feel sick today and whenever I feel sick, I’m worried it’s forever.

A lot of things have been outside my control, from disease to other people’s behavior. I was telling someone last week that bad things seem to have happened to me, while I’ve had to actively make the good things happen.

A few weeks ago, I went to a talk about neuroendocrine tumors. When it came to the part about ki markers, I just remember that mine aren’t good. After PRRT, the average is 40 months of wellness. I was given six. My rare VIPoma tumors produce hormones that have terrible effects. I’m younger than most people who have this cancer. Most people think I am a caregiver, a daughter, not the patient. When they realize I am the patient, something in their faces shifts.

Sometimes it all catches up to me, and I cry out of exhaustion. Last week, I was the lady with the black eye crying on the train, my favorite place to cry. (As I have mentioned before, I don’t feel alone but I also don’t feel so vulnerable or like I have to explain anything.)

Oh, I gave myself a black eye last week. The black eye is a symbol of something. I’m still not sure what. I had gotten my chipped front teeth fixed and was ready to take on the world. Then my sick cat had to go to the vet, and as I ran to catch him to put him in his carrier, I tripped on cat-urine-soaked bedding and fell face-first into a trunk. The top of my eye socket hit the trunk lid so hard, I saw stars. It was like a cartoon: as I lay on the floor bleeding, the animated stars circling my head, the cat sauntered away.

I arrived at the emergency vet, bruised and bloody. “Is he hard to handle?” asked the vet tech, visibly worried, as her eyes moved from my swelling purple eye to the big tabby cat in his carrier.

My sweet cat Ziggy has been leaking since he had a bladder obstruction. On Friday, the vet said that maybe his bladder had stretched out and might not go back, and if that were the case, I’d have to put him down. He’s only three. He’s so smart and sweet that when I give him pills and they fall out of his mouth, he’ll try to dutifully eat the pill from the floor. He’s an exceptional cat, and I love him so much. Are you kidding me? I mentally railed. You can’t leave me this one thing?

Luckily, it seems as if the medication is working. I woke up last night to thunder and to three cats that had set themselves up diagonally across the bed. Ziggy, who was (and always is) snuggled closest to me, is drier and less groggy.

Saturday marked two years since my umbrella loss, but it was also another anniversary, according to Facebook: Five years earlier, I’d gone into the hospital for a monthlong stay for my stem cell transplant to treat my refractory Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That also brought up some complicated feelings: the hope I’d had then, when I didn’t know I had a second type of cancer.

The past several years in particular seem like they’ve been full of high highs and low lows, with very little in between. Not everything lasts. Often I’m preoccupied with good not lasting or wondering when good things will be taken away. It’s a particular type of suffering, I learned at a dharma talk this summer. But the bad doesn’t always last forever either. I’ve been trying to become comfortable with the fleeting nature of happiness. I’ve been trying to learn to be happy with what I have instead of what I want or what I think will make me happy.

While worried about Ziggy on Saturday, I went to yoga. It wasn’t the class I’d planned to go to, but I’d mixed up the times. Often when that happens, it ends up being fortuitous. After class, the teacher read an excerpt from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, about the balance between joy and sorrow.

“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, ‘Joy is greater than sorrow,’ and others say, ‘Nay, sorrow is the greater.’
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”

It was exactly what I needed to hear.

Sometimes, when I realize I’m feeling OK, I’m so joyful. It’s nice when I’m well and not sick. (Conversely, when I am sick, I freak out it’s forever.)

I don’t know what to do with the rest of my short life. Who does? I live life intensely, but I always have. Sometimes I feel like I have to justify what I do, but I know that’s not specific to me. A friend pointed out that some people might always question my choices. Why am I still working? Why am I traveling? Why do I work out? (The last one is easy—if your time on earth might be limited and you want to stretch it out, 30 seconds of squat-jumps, burpees, or mountain-climbers seem like an eternity.) I don’t know what to do except march forward.

I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’ll get sick again soon.

But tonight, Ziggy was purring and playing a game on the iPad. He sits curled up with me as I type. Right now, we have this moment and are happy.