On the Road

It feels much better to be going somewhere, to have forward, directional motion. It feels good to see the bleak French landscape in February and to stop morosely circulating between my bed, my sofa, hospital and local cafes – all I’ve been able to cope with since the diagnosis two weeks ago.

It helps that I can feel spring is coming. Even the weak, flat sunlight is welcome in the small French town we stopped in on the way down. My days are dominated by two new collections of feelings. An overwhelming sense of love and longing for beauty in the natural world. The opaque mint green colour of a French river, the contrast of a swan’s orange beak. The way the low sun falls. And fear. Not burning cringing kind of fear but a dark creeping shadow that passes over me every time I feel a new sensation in my bones where I now know the cancer is. Passing but unusual dark headaches that swirl around my brain like black fog. The results of my biopsy and brain scan come Tuesday over the phone. I am afraid. Quietly. I’ve already been told the worse but it could, marginally, be worse than that.

At least, in motion, I feel I have some calm and some grace. I think I am (we all are?) addicted to perpetual motion. Living life on wheels with the landscape whooshing by. I’m trying to find time to be still but it triggers and a dangerous current of reflection and projection into an unknown future I’m not ready to fully embrace yet.