Green Balloon

What’s bursting out of me today is that I’m really tired.
(Does tired “burst”?
Maybe oozing or seeping might be better –
like a balloon’s slow deflate, sink-floating, never to return back to the heights it once knew.)

They’ve cut five tumors out of me already. By this time tomorrow, it will be seven.
More hope, energy, dollar bills seeping from each slice;
I ooze, I bleed, I deflate.

BUT. I stay afloat.
I have not touched the ground yet, my string still dancing in the wind, pivoting around the mountains and through the forest tress that always wave hello…. I ride the wind, the gust, the storms that blow through and once in a while raise me back to the heights of my youth again.

Now I know, grief is green.

Green like the Hulk,
it sometimes rages and smashes.

Other times, it is almost delicate,
a baby reed bending and blowing with its sisters.

It is green with envy when they have what you never will,
or green like the benjamins spent on kayak or amazon to
fill the holes you can’t stop feeling.

Grief is green bananas with no sweet
and green gators with sharp teeth.

Grief isn’t always angry.
It is sometimes gentle, like a mother
and soft, like moss.

And every once in a while, like a green deflating balloon,
it floats.

New words

It is morning.

Night’s current spits me onto morning’s shore, and I wake twisted in black seaweed that is my hair. Dead hair abounds: limp, black squiggles across my white pillowcase, between my fingers, strung on my sleeves.

It’s wet and gray outside my window and I note how my insides feel the same. I try brushing myself free from the hair, judging each strand for betraying me like this, then make my way slowly to the bathroom. At the sink, the water running, there is an image that stares back at me of a girl I know of but do not recognize, like a character in a good novel whose story soaks your heart but whose face remains a blur.

My scalp is clearly visible through my hair. I feel like an alien.

The hair that’s still on my head, though sparse, provides me a sense of normalcy through cancer treatment. How merciful such a simple, superficial thing as the appearance of normalcy can be in the quest for survival, bobbling one’s head to the surface here and there for air.

Please, Lord, let my hair hang on. These are the words I’ve muttered daily, half a prayer, half a pep-talk to the sad little strands. But today, as I stare at the face in my bathroom mirror as the strands float into the sink like silent fall leaves, I find myself whispering new words.  Words I never dreamed of uttering before.

If losing all my hair would bring you more glory, Lord, have your way with me.