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June 17, 2008
I am sitting upstairs in my very own tree house of an attic,
a bit too warm and still cluttered with stacks of papers and boxes of glitter
pens and wrapped wires. Hannah the cat is calling out to find out where I am; Chad is on the train back home
to Salem, where we have decided to plant our roots.
It hasn’t been easy to find myself lately. I haven’t had time to figure out
how not to be scared. Or angry. I’ve been angry. I am stifled by my health. I am frustrated by my health. I am petrified
of my health. I ask myself constantly if I have a future with children, if I
have a future with my husband, if I have a future at all—or if my TN pain will
take all of that away from me. And then I get scared and I cry. And then I get
mad and determined. And I make phone calls and doctor’s appointments and I talk
to Chad. And then I’m okay for another few weeks and then it happens all over
again. I so hoped to have a summer off—to not have to think about pain or be
scared of pain or feel paralyzed by pain. But it’s not looking like that is
going to happen as the nerve pain has settled in my teeth. And honestly, it’s
not as bad as the Trigeminal pain, so maybe I should just take it. But it
scares me that there is some large wormy brown slime lurking under the
gums—ready to take over my whole body. And it scares me that I can’t find
anyone who has answers for this brown slime. No one wants to claim it or name
it or kill it.
I love that this is our house. I love that I get to sit up
here and watch Hannah skulk around the boxes, ready to pounce on anything that
blinks. I love that there is a yellow peach rose out front, bright and fat. It
is our first rose. Our first one. We will have so many roses, Chad and I. So
many roses that we will forget what it was like to not have roses. So many roses
that we will take them for granted. We will be able to fill our vases with them and smell them wafting in
from the open windows. We will put the petals in our baths and we will sink
into the water and sigh.
Bubbles is coming soon. I can’t wait to meet her. I can’t
wait to show her my roses.
