Mary

I’m sitting on a recliner in the dark, it’s a small, older recliner.  No frills.  The glow of the salt rock (Himalayan?) lamp sits behind the glow of my laptop screen.  There’s a heavy silence in this room, the clicking of my fingers on this keyboard seem too loud.  It’s past midnight and I’m sitting up on my last night here.

I’m in Mary’s place.

When the lights are on, you can see a few posters on the wall, I have stared at them. One is a human figure with a heart on one of them in mostly black and white, but honestly I have no clue what they are for or what they mean to Mary.  I wish I knew, but enjoy them nonetheless. The wall hangings that reside in what ‘would be’ the dining room are the ones that interested me more. They are magazine covers of Mary’s published writing, off-beat indie type, literature ‘zines.  They sit over-top of her bicycle that hasn’t been ridden in too long, alongside the longboard that also collects dust these days.

To my right is a futon.  The futon is kind of funny, I was supposed to sleep in it but instead I’ve curled up in this pint-sized recliner every  night.  I’m not even sure why, except I feel contained…held by this chair in a way.  With the lights on you would see the pill bottles lined up on the chest on the floor.  The same chest that holds the salt rock lamp.  Her yoga mat sits on the hard tile floor, it’s a place she spends most of her awake time holding planks way longer than seems humanly possible, but it’s how she gets her relief.

I don’t know why I am describing my surroundings in depth so much, other than to avoid the things that are harder to say.  I haven’t visited Mary in almost 18 years.  We’ve seen each other back home a couple times, in our old stomping grounds, but I didn’t make the trek out to Arizona to see her since she graduated college.  This trip is because she has cancer.

I hate that.

I met Mary when she was six, I’m 1.5 years older than her.  She was this little wirey, spirited, unusual girl with coke bottle glasses that always sat crooked on her little nose.  Her hair still does the same thing it did back then, it’s curly and flies back away from her face as if she’s always walking into the wind, a little wild and untamed.  Just like her spirit.

She and I shared a love for soccer back then.  She thought of herself as a mad scientist, full of ‘inventions’ and curiosity for the world.  When she laughed, usually laughing hardest at herself, she would hold onto your shoulder like she was so funny she literally couldn’t ‘stand’ it.  On rare occasion, without a shoulder to hold, she did actually fall to the ground and laugh and roll around.  That was the best!  Maybe the thing she was laughing at wasn’t as funny to me, but seeing her roll around just entrenched in her own amusement was enough funniness all by itself.

But she also struggled.  She struggled to find her voice in her world.  She had one, it’s just that she didn’t have the platform to speak it.  When she came out here to Arizona, I knew she’d find that voice and she did. I was so happy for her, even though it meant I’d lose her to this place…I knew it the day she left to come here.   She found her voice in her stories published in the zines showcased on her walls, in her adventures and the people that gravitated into her life. I almost guarantee that her best words are hidden away in journals meant only for her.

I’m still avoiding the whole part where Mary has cancer.  That’s really the hard part and I don’t want to talk about it really.  I see her struggling to reconcile the person she knows herself to be, the adventurer who rode that bike, ran miles every day, and described full rippling muscles that helped her carry 45 lb packs on ‘burns’…she is a forest firefighter in her healthier days.  She doesn’t recognize herself now.  She’s so skinny, the odd thing is she doesn’t seem frail to me in most moments.

It’s when I’m taping the bag over her nephrostomy tubes and my fingers run softly over the jagged bones of her back that I realize how thin she really is.

I will admit, I’ve watched her and wondered if this is the last time I will spend with my friend Mary.  I wonder if we’ll ever again wax poetic over a walk through the park, talking about our teenage crushes and stupid shit we did, reminiscing on people we haven’t thought of in over two decades…because that’s where our story suspended way back when.  Our paths diverged, she built her life here and I built mine back home.  It’s just that there is a foreverness to our bond that still lives, unaltered by time and distance.

As kids it was literally an every day thing.  Mary and I never fought….she wasn’t that type of friend to me.  She was the type of friend who you could sit for an hour pulling grass blades in the back yard and maybe exchange 10 words between the two of you. Peaceful.  Easy.  I kind of feel like we do that now, her on her yoga mat trying to find comfortable positions to stretch, me on my recliner clicking away on the keyboard.  There’s no requirement to speak.  And then there might be a suddenly deep and meaningful conversation.  As kids it might have been about soccer or a song that we loved.

This time it was about death.  She said, “I’m not afraid of death, I’m really not.  I’m afraid of pain and suffering.”  And I know she’s thought about it, not like most of us do, but like someone who sees herself squaring off at it, who FEELS it in the cancer that’s invaded her body.  She knows how real this is.  And she finds peace in death.  She just doesn’t want the stuff that comes before it.  She doesn’t want the stuff that she’s already been facing for 2 years, not really knowing why she felt that way.  But she wants to fight too.

She just really wants her family to know how much she loves them, that’s her next big thought as she ponders death.  How much does she love her family?  Not ‘I love you’ …those 3 words are fucking words.  What do they REALLY mean?  Her desire is to truly convey what they really mean.  Her hope is to find the words that dig way down deep and take over all space, and every fiber of her being, and express love in a way that is undeniable, all-encompassing, and puts on display the absolute fullness of her heart that is engolfed in that love.

She spends her days in pain, fatigued, anxious….and she longs to share her love for her family through her art…her words.  That’s Mary.

It makes me ask myself, what would I say to Mary, if I left nothing unsaid?

Mary, you’re a sister to me, someone I just always have and always will love and feel tied to, someone who helped shape who I am and know myself.  Our souls rest easy together, plucking blades of grass in silence.  We shared thousands and thousands of moments in our childhood together, and every one of them  meant the world to me, even though there’s so many to sift through, some of those moments wouldn’t show much if you had them on a movie reel, because our friendship sat in the quiet space between us as much as in anything we actually did together.  But we did everything together.

I can’t imagine how many  more thousands there would have been  if you’d stayed close by, but I can’t imagine how you’d ever have been you and not have come on this adventure out west. It just became a bigger quiet space between us, but always still filled with the love I’ve always had for you.  This is your place, it’s where you found your serenity.  It’s where you found your voice.  It’s a voice I promise you I always heard, and it’s why I know you so well now, so many years later.  I know you Mary, and I love you for you.

No matter what this cancer does to you, I know you’ll be out running a burn, or driving in your light blue, 80-something Tacoma through the desert, or maybe just sitting quietly by someone you don’t need to talk to to feel close to, feeling all the love that never gets said in the words “I  love you”.

I love you, but not just the words.  So far beyond the words.

That’s what I would say.  But I just listened to her instead, as she shared her deepest fears and hopes, and knew she knows.