It's a funny thing, dying. Not “haha” funny, “slap your knees and wipe off tears” funny. No, not at all. Not the calm funny, “smirk and send a meaningful glance to your wife who gets the inside joke” funny.
Dying is fucking hilarious funny. It is the kind of hilarious it would be to find out that when you're looking from the correct distance, our galaxy would spell out FART like an interstellar fucking neon sign. That would be hilarious. It's “wanting to rip part of your brain out to be able to hear the joke for the first time again” hilarious.
Sadly the pain in my stomach isn't much like the one you get after too much laughing. It's the pain you get when you have a tumor wrapped like clingfilm around your liver, and slowly but surely digs through it, spreading through it like mold on that swiss cheese you forgot you put the workplace fridge a month ago. The cheese is my liver, the mold is my cancer, my little tag along friend. And the refrigerator this stinky cheese was forgotten in is me.
I can hear you thinking, but Sarah Lynn, how can cancer be funny? That's insensitive, Sarah Lynn, oh my God, too soon.
Well, you know what? Fuck you, Sharon. You're the one who made me drink a fuck ton of booze, which is the only way to put up with your sorry ass, so technically, you shouldn't even be opening your goddamn mouth. Sharon. Fucking Sharon. Not exactly much of a help... Sharon. I only married you to put that goddamn ring on your finger anyway.
Don't worry, don't worry. I'm fully aware that Sharon isn't really here. But you know what, this is what makes dying so...entertaining is, I can get away with these kinds of things. Being dying so many times as I have - I get this joke. I know that being in a state of dying and being dead soon are far from the same thing.
Like I know that my ex-wife isn't in the room. But if I feel like ranting at the image of her my mind put there, no one's going to tell me not to. Because I'm strung out on morphine and I can do what I damn well please. Also, it makes me feel good. I think it helps me win my mental battle against her if I can envision her.
Also – hilarious! I got sober 374 days ago. That is 243 days before I got diagnosed. 12 steps all the way up to the sky, counting the days, collecting little badges. I stopped beating up my poor liver and cleaned up my act. I mean, it's only the greatest joke in the world, that this would give my body enough breathing space to allow my cells to do their thing, multiply, grow, mutate, spread, spill over, and fuck it up again. I had my party and now they have theirs. And also make me totally dependant on... everything. I mean Morphine is one thing. Being dependant on having someone wiping your ass and coping with, what I can only assume is the blood-mixed fertilizer, that comes out. Couldn't go a day without a drink, now I can't go an hour without Sister Morphine, so I guess it's really more of an upgrade of addiction. But that's life, or maybe death, for people like me. We have self-destructive bodies, but we sure can reconstruct them by being awesome.
You know what, fuck you, Sharon. You don't get to sit there mocking me in that chair. You spring from my imagination, I should at least get to decide what kind of crap you throw at me.
I remember when I married Saul, though, that was way better. It didn't last long, of course, that time it was the Spanish Flu, got it 6 months into the marriage. I fell ill extremely quickly, and I had to drain him in just two days. Sad stuff... I wore the widow's black for a week before I left town. Before anybody got suspicious. I shouldn't reminisce, it makes me think of better times... or better exes technically. Fucking Sharon, what a complete waste of space.
Bitch is just sitting there, her left leg thrown up on the arm rest on the metal chair, pressing her fat, pale thigh into a soggy pancake. I swear I can even smell the cigarette stench of her breath, and the mascara gunk in the corner of her left eye looks like a shiny black tear. I'd almost think she was sad if she hadn't been grinning like an idiot. ”I'm not Sharon”, she croaks as she exhales one of her Pall Mall 100s. ”I'm your cancer, bitch.” I try to seem uninterested, because I've been down this road with her before, and I'm very nearly too tired to have this fight again. Tumour-Sharon drags herself clumsily, drunkenly out of the chair and wobbles over the bed. Sure enough, her skin looks like it's infested with yellow and creamy white blotches, the shape of cauliflowers cut in half, my tumors displayed on her body like modern art.
She leans in and licks my right temple, over where my hair line used to be before the chemo made it fall out in chunks. Her tongue tears off some of the fluffy, feathery hair that's left. Some of it sticks in her purple lipstick but she ignores it. As usual. Her dull red-dyed hair sweep over my face, as she again leans in. ”Sarah Lynn, for fucks sake, do you really wanna go through this again? You should just give up. You were at least fucking manageable when you were drunk and hopeless. Fighting never suited you, bitch.”
But yes, you know what, Sharon. We are gonna do this again. And tomorrow, and the day after that. Fighting suits me just fine, and you're still wearing my ring. I fiddle with the subcutaneous needle in my hand until I get the somewhat floppy, but sharp, plastic drain out. My hand looks like a pin cushion, pink scars, and wart-like bumps from needles, I hate it. Thankfully they'll be gone soon. It's hard to pick someone up if you look like a junkie.
As she starts to push her yellow nails through my graying chin, I stab her in the side of the neck. I stab and stab and stab, until the black motor oil spills out from her arteries, and slowly trickles down the front of her polyester dress. I feel the wedding ring I still wear growing warmer, radiating heat and force through my pulsating veins, making most of the pain go away.
She always looks so surprised. Yet we do this every day. The first month or so of chemo, she would win, though, her cracked hands would push through my hamstring and grope around until she found the liver and she would squeeze it so hard I would throw up for hours on end. The past few weeks, she's been getting what was coming, though, I've bashed her head in with the stand for the IV while I was shuffling to the toilet, dragging it behind me, the plastic bag of liquid flapping against it. She goes down quite easy, doesn't take much force. She's not real, so it should be, fucking Tumour-Sharon. I'll tell you what was really funny about that time, though, her brain matter just flopped around in that black oily blood of hers for minutes, pulsating, white and gray and pink. Then I stomped it, and it stopped wriggling about. It was awesome. I lay back in the bed, feeling invigorated. In a way seeing her ugly face makes my day. My ring still feels warm against my skinny finger, and the ruby glistens in the pale winter light that seeps through the curtains.
I must've dozed off. The nurse wakes by a gentle touch on the arm, the oncologist standing behind her perusing the papers in his hands. The nurses here all look at you like you're dying. That too is hilarious, 'cause what the fuck do they know. They always give us a sad smile, full of sympathy, and make sure to say a proper good bye before they leave, in case we go belly up before they come back for their next shift. It's cute though. They mean well.
”I've got some good news, Mrs... I mean miss Jackson. All the bloodwork, and the CT from last week all point to the same thing. The ultra-sound you had yesterday confirmed it – you seem to be in remission! I know that the outlook after the first two rounds of chemo wasn't that optimistic, and that the surgery was unsuccessful, but I have to say – I've never seen a case where a hepatocellular carcinoma that advanced get this much better, in such a short time, in my medical career!” He leaves me to deal with the happy news. I feigned just the right amount of relief, shed some happy tears of surprise to make them go away quickly enough. I'm not surprised. I know that Sharon, fucking Sharon, my brilliant ex-wife who used to be so full of life, is withering away as I get stronger. She fought back at first, as she still lived in what used to be our house, my house really but who's counting, with painkillers and that pure mind-over-matter attitude she always had. But hell if I'm not stronger. Like fucking Sharon could beat me, I've done this so many times, lived through so many years, eaten away at women and men before her. I've seen that marriage is the easiest way to get them to wear the ring that creates the bond between our life energies. They wear it everyday without thinking about it. Hell, Sharon even wore her ring, the twin of mine, even after we got divorced.
The ring, the ring, the ring. I hold it between my fingers, letting the sunlight that sifts through the budding spring leaves shine through it, and it glistens, glistens, glistens. It looks as shiny and new as when I first got it all those years ago. It has supplied we with the force of 9 spouses so far, and two ”close friends”, as my body starts to drag me back to the grave I've escaped so long. Fucking Sharon’s fucking sister called me last night. After have been in a coma for 3 days, she passed away last night. I know she was in pain, I know she was scared. I could feel her seep into me and disappear into my strength and life and power. I exit the hospital, pulling my bags behind me and life has never felt better.
Submitted August 25, 2016 at 03:20AM by tanjasimone http://ift.tt/2bjhgtE libraryofshadows
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