The Big D

. . . as in Death March. I don't know that I've ever articulated this before, but every time I go to Dallas I feel like I'm going home to die. Especially this time.

I have no parents there anymore; although my very real, consistent, tender and tough family in the form of my BFF/sistergirl does indeed live there still, in a house in which I feel very much at home, with her darling husband and dog and baby-to-be. I will be the most horrifyingly doting, smothering, adoring, wacky auntie that ever was. Mark my words.

So I'm going back, back, back to the hospitals where I was treated for the dreaded cancer that did not manage to kill me. I'm going back to the places where I learned to numb myself, to separate from my body, to trust in my own strength and despise my vulnerability. I'll be looking at it all square in the face.

But before then, and because of my neurotic fear that I might not return alive, I'm tying up as many loose ends as possible around here. I'm spending time telling the people I love how much I love them; I'm seeking resolution with the stupid fuckers who think they love me but nearly destroy me instead.

So I'm embodying a place of deep compassion, but that scares me a little, too. I worry that the closer I get to some kind of enlightenment or self-actualization or whatever the hell you want to call it, the faster Death will come and take me away. I have an irrational belief that each of us has been put here to take care of certain cosmic business, and as I tick off each thing, I wonder what's left. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that I have finished everything or attained enlightenment (God help us all if this is what it looks like), but who knows, really, what the end will be.

All kinds of people attempt to reassure me about things like love and life and death, and I appreciate it. Really, I do. And I listen. I honor other people's experiences and the narratives they tell themselves about those experiences. But mostly it doesn't hold a lot of water for me. It's not that "nobody knows the trouble I've seen." That's bullshit. It's that I'm a journalist who believes in empirical evidence. And I listened to a whole lot of Motown as a kid. I believe what I see, what I experience. And then only half of that.

Yet none of it really explains any of the existential questions. So I'm going deeper. Attempting to anyway. I'm seeking the contours of my own heart. For me that means paying attention to right now and looking back to discover what the path to right now has been.

And then what?

I'll keep you posted.