two years and then some

I have trouble finishing what I start. It hasn't always been this way: I would finish homework and finish three-hour-long violin practice sessions and finish ten books in a row and return them all to the library on time, no late fees. Something changed. I did, I suppose. Illness tornadoed through me and I didn't recognize the ash it left behind, this skeleton still mine but bent, sore, bulletholed with grief. What happens when all that remains is your unwashed reflection, years older, worn through with lines, and for what? Why is time black ice? Is it enough to be alive, to have survived the unsurvivable?

Perhaps I'm emerging from a two-year-long (longer) cocoon. It wasn't time then. I'm not sure it is now. I have no wings carrying me skyward and I am no more colorful than the last time I clicked open this box. The only thing I know is that I'm still here, and these days my breathing is usually a fact of my own choosing. I still forget to eat sometimes. Still cry and rage and panic and burrow under covers hoping to make myself, pain, disappear. Illness is a shadow that still walks in step with me, rarely letting go my hand. PTSD and I share this one small body, battling it out on the bus, at work, in a poem, or curled up sleeping like sunpooled cats because I'm too tired to fight anymore.

In my last entries I said healing is messy. Ugly. It is. But it's also slow and unbelievably boring. How many hours have I spent hiding in isolation, in utter hopelessness, just to return two years later to this white box without so much as a single epiphany? I still don't have any answers. But I have this instead: gratitude. For my body, every struggling cell. For the illness, the infections, the coughing immune system, the almost-didn't-make-it, my greatest teachers. For the poems when they snake their way through the clouds in my brain. And I have love, after five+ years swearing it off entirely. Love of chosen family, of my beloved, of a few precious blood family. And I have jobs, two of them. And a pile of grad school applications I must finish this month (procrastination is my one abiding constant). And changes ahead, so many unknowns, scary but also exciting when I breathe past the panic, like perhaps I can craft a life outside of illness, a life shaped by it, certainly, one that looks nothing like I imagined as a child, but a life that is full and rich and sweet and made up of more than struggling-to-survive. I have survived. Am surviving. (Sometimes I still pinch my own skin; really, am I really here?)

So, then, what next?