Reflecting Pane #III
Reflecting on distant pain is one of many privileges.
Four years from surgery, you tally your losses.
And what you found.
It can hurt when you say, ‘Cat’s got your tongue?’
Each word costs a little extra. So you try to make meaning.
Your voice doesn’t sound quite like ‘you’. Traded a tumored jaw for a faded neck-splash of scars, knots under your chin, a numb-tingle of skin.
Nerves grow a millimeter-a-day, like little glacial rivers of healing.
Forever breaking in a new jaw. A wounded mouth heals, but eating can be anxious. Swallowing sometimes difficult. Choking quite easy.
You re-inhabit your body — like you’re moving back home to someone you love.
Though things are less tasteful now.
So you savor slow conversations with your food.
And when the dental hygienist says you have perfect self-care, you are not as elated as you might imagine.
You go for a hike and offer your small victory to the sky.
You do all the necessary things, or so you hope.
Surrendering your self-appointed pain in an amnesty.
And when the world’s suffering begins to hurt more than your own, you wonder, does this mean that I am healed now?
How to raise the thresh hold for what hurts?
Recalling when it’s all stripped away, only kindness really matters.
You know how it feels to lose your voice, and find it again.
You had the silent treatment, once, and it’s good to have your say back — though you miss speaking mindlessly.
Telling yourself to go bold or go back to bed.
You grapple with your clarity.
Because you’re so preposterously grateful to speak, that you can’t hide behind impeded consonants, or be tethered by your tongue. You don’t always have to say the right things in the right way.
You can be a fractured voice, in a broken world, without the answer.
And reflect on your pain and say, ‘I fell back in love with my life.’
And hope that the world can still recall its own beauty.
2–2–2020: This is the four-year anniversary of surgery for jaw cancer. N.E.D. Following surgery, I couldn’t speak for several weeks, and then six weeks later, radiation treatment to my throat sent me silent again. Recovering over the next year, I could speak, but words cost more. My pronunciation was impeded and I had trouble raising the volume. Many things I had an impulse to say no longer seemed worthy of the effort. Recovering more, today, I still feel self-conscious about how different my voice sounds. But then, it’s such a grateful miracle to actually have a voice, that some times, I just go ahead and speak anyway.
