Keeping the Word

Keeping My Word

Writer’s live for words. Die trying
To find the precise wording for the
menagerie of existence. My roles
are few. When inert lust created me,
the tag read, ‘ does well with words.’
When life is same shit, different day,
My go to is ‘ let’s try to spin this straw life
Into something valuable. ‘Words are
My Rapunzel. Death has come for me,
Many times, in many ways.
One particular year, grief gnawed me
so badly I had evicted myself out of my body,
My soul, my existence. There was so little
Of me that I had no energy to push words together.
I had only the strength to hold one word.
It was all chips on the table. One word,
Hold it and carry it for one year,
Or collapse under the weight of it,
And be suffocated. The inability to hold one
Word, would tell me I could no longer carry
Breath, blood, anything needed for life.
I chose it. At first I could barely get up
To feed it, water it, but with all the strength within me,
I did that if nothing else. By spring,
It had bloomed. As that word flowered. I followed.
I began to put other words around it,
And we both became stronger.
By fall, I was reading poems to friends again,
Even amassing laughter and hope.
Every year since, I start the year with one word.

The year my house flooded on New Years Eve,
I looked around on January 1st, and everything
Was wet, and I didn’t cry.
I knew wherever I was going,
I’d take my word, and I’d have that.
Last year, as I lay on a gurney in a hospital
In the middle of the hall, no plugs to even
Create the noise and distraction of a heart monitor,
There was a word. In March, when they
Took a mass out of my throat, I asked myself
Was it still there? Did they remove it?
By July, when I was covered in bruises.
My memory shattered, my heart left at the scene
Of an accident, “ Did I leave it at the scene? I ask myself.

Sometime between crashing cars on vacation,
Getting stranded in airports for days bruised
And without functioning brain, nights spent in hospitals,
unsure of where I was, pushing out kidney stones,
I really began to wonder where I left or lost my word.
I began to question if I just let it die
Like an unwatered house plant
Because I was so busy performing,
Trying to make it look like I was not drowning,
My drowning was visible and as startling
To those around me, as it was when I took off my shirt
For the first time in that urgent care room,
My chest a collage of every shade of purple
Crayola has ever dreamed up. The doctor panicked
At my own inability to see the collection of blood
Unleashed like a tsunami inside me.

Clearly, the world was not with me then.
The medical notes all read the same,
‘Patient seems to be unaware of his surroundings,’
Which was only partially true. I knew
I needed to continue performing.
“Patient appears to believe he is working here,’
They recorded as I helped disabled and other sick patients
To the bathroom. I knew the surrounding,
A place of need, a place to keep moving,
To not slow down at any cost
Because I might have to accept
What I had done. I had lost the word.
The one place I needed to be, with myself,
I had let it go somewhere.
My shelter… evicted.

One day a friend asked me about the word.
I admitted I had no memory of what it was.
One night driving home from dinner,
With a family member on the eve of a major surgery
She was having in her battle with breast cancer,
I noted, ‘ The only thing that feels certain is
Right now I’m learning how to sit with deep uncertainty.’
She just looked over her shoulder with the most serious look
And said, ‘ Yes, and that is a very hard lesson to learn.’
“It is,” I agreed and smiled at her.
That night I listened to her and my mom talk about
Studying their labs, doctor’s notes, in their medical files,
Being surprised, at times, that there was stuff in the chart
They were not aware of. I quietly rocked on the wooden swing,
Knowing with certainty I do the same thing all the time.

As the year drew to a close and my blood sugars
Dipped like the amount of daylight in the day.
As I lay in bed sweating, pushing orange juice
Trying to pimp sugar out to my blood, void of it.
I tried hard to think of the word.
Many nights, too exhausted, I’d roll over
And hope that someone remembered the word for me.
I’d go to work and sit with people all day.
Most days, all I heard and could reflect back was,
“It is so incredibly hard to sit with that uncertainty.’
As I said it over and over again, I began to wonder
If the word left me somewhere along the way,
Understanding that it was simply performing a role,
For which it could not take credit for.
It was just too painfully true
The word of the year that I was searching for
Was causing me to not recognize the real word of the year,
The one who was with me for the whole ride,
The one I kept telling people ‘how hard it was to sit with,’
when right next to me all year, sitting beside me was
‘Uncertainty.’