I am Nothing, I am Everything

My head is sagging with the exhaustion of it all. My belly aches with soreness from a laughter that seems to have accompanied the removal of my appendix. Suddenly the simple seems so funny, for so many moments since, I have been filled with smiles, the air brings whispers of constant thanks. Thank you for my children, my husband, my family, my home, my life. Thank you. You, spirit, light, earth, mother, all that is and was and never was but somehow is. I hear you. There were nights (really only one) of excruciating pain, like my body was being twisted and pulled and not enough air was reaching my lungs. Each time my head would raise, I would reel shattered, broken. For a day, after that night, I staired listlessly out the window, the pain and nausea too much, the tubes too many, the beeps and bandages and pokes and prods, too much. I felt too vulnerable. I was scared. I thought I would die. I did think that, and now I believe parts of me did die, thoughts and sections. For moments only, then I would try to find a distraction, mostly in memories, but the memories would contradict and clash argue with each other for primacy and leave me confused and feeling trapped. Morphine dreams were the most relieving part, swimming through seas of cool reflection a body freed from all immanence, yet immanently feeling not the pain bu the tingling of embodiedness. They would end to wake up a request for surveillance, a need to be measured and recorded, and I would wish for my eyelids to help me return to that daze, that daze of sweat and rest. There is something to be said for the cultural aspects of what it means to be perceived as marginal in regards to nutrition. No meat was the banter of the docs, holding me to the bed like protein laden chains. The army needs to build up to fight this war, and since when did I need to see my corporeality as a battle ground? Do you not know that I studied the ways in which your medicine used colonialism as a metaphor for the medical notion of immunity? I see through this, but you see me as small and female and unable to grasp the largess of your gift to grant life. I am. You saved my life sir. Thank you. You are so skilled sir, thank you. Without that skill and those medicines it is true I would be gone, just barely short of the next passing of my birth, leaving my earthbound children motherless, leaving my own mother grieving. And so it is clear in so many ways what I am receiving. A chance to find balance and a new accord with the ways my job and ambitions has gulped me up from the simple joys of watching two children grow and holding my partner close, smelling his skin, feeling his chest, where other organs that I took for granted now seem so precious. I would too fight for them like he held to me, fingers clasped in a grasp I have held for nearly half my life, holding on and saying there is more. Trust. Home, please, let me go home, enough of these nights of endless aching and longing, enough of the voices that hide in my head waiting to bite, threatening to take my life away, telling me it is short, nearly gone. Transform this, other sounds tell me. It is not about living long and hard, it is about living well and now. I am nothing, I am everything, and as the light shone on me in my exit and the air rushed in and about, my mouth opened in a painful, joyous laughter.