Evening, I visit with a friend on her porch. I’ve forced myself from the couch, leaving behind a Carl Hoffman book. My friend talk about little things—knitting mittens, a curry recipe—and the submerged currents that drive our lives—poetry and sex and a vision to transform my side yard into perennials. The daylight dwindles. Today, foliage colors hum at their radiant best, and I say goodbye, gather my hat, and head out on a walk into the twilight. That afternoon, I’d stopped along the Rail Trail to run. A man had parked a long RV in the otherwise empty lot, watercolors and an easel propped on the granite block wall. When I returned, gasping and sweaty, we talked for a bit. I just want to be here, he says, outside. Which mirrors my own sentiment.

There’s no one else out this night, but two boys on bicycles, racing and shouting, crossing the nearly empty road.

Twice, today, I’ve had that otherworldly sense of déjà-vu. While listening to this stranger with his watercoloring and my friend with her library book in her lap, I’m also in a consultation room and the oncologist tells me the lymphoma has returned. I understand the seriousness in his voice; we’ve laughed about many other things, but there’s no laughing now. In this strange state, I leap up and stand in the doorway, one foot in the room, one in the halfway. Real, or not?

For years, I’ve endeavored to hone my discipline, to keep writing, keep working, read, walk, pay attention, listen to the story around you, for goodness sake, but the physical pain of cancer forced me to be here now, in ways I didn’t want. Nonetheless. And that’s one enormous nonetheless.

I loop around the village and return up my short steep road in the darkness. I’ve been on that threshold for years, half in, half out, always running for the woods and the trails along the river, the mountain path, gathering little scraps of conversations and friendships into my pockets, never trusting their radiance, like this foliage, won’t fade. Cancer, of course, as disease will, rendered running impossible. Across that lawn where I intend to sow a wider garden, a fox streaks, shadowy in the night. For a few moments, I stand in the surprisingly warm end-of-September night, breathing in the fragrance of fallen apples, juice sweetening the earth.

And that Hoffman book about the Asmat? The shifting realm of what’s real and what’s not? Unlearn the questions.

“But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment…”
― Carl Hoffman