Cancer/Free

One of my earliest memories, which in truth may not be a memory, but a story that I have internalized, mythologized, is trying to escape Sunday School as a toddler. I remember, or I think I remember, running down the long hallways, the brick floors, and bursting out of the glass double-doors, only to be swooped up by my benevolent teacher. Is one of my keystone memories actually of escaping a cold building in favor of the beautiful outside? Or is it only now that my life has fallen along a certain track and I have created a certain narrative about my fate that this memory has gained its importance? How many millions of moments of my developmental years have been washed away into nothingness in favor of moments that can be transposed to bolster the all-important story? In other words, how much of our lives are controlled by our temperaments and how much of what we choose to do is because we believe that we are somebody that we may not actually be? Because we are all given stories about ourselves before we are old enough to write our own - you are creative, gifted, disadvantaged, you are a problem child - we know now how much a child’s development can be influenced by the words of others and how an extraordinarily bright young child can be made to believe they are a fool and we watch in real time them conform to the parameters we set for them.

So my life story that I have created, the narrative I have built for myself, includes every time I went to detention, every time I argued with a member of authority, jobs I walked out of, etc. I write myself up as someone who is rebellious, mistrusting, and endlessly trying to escape. Escape what? I don’t know just escape. Is that your perception of me, reader? Is that who I am? Is this the archetype I was made to fulfill? Maybe. Probably not. There are as many perceptions of me as there are people capable of perceiving me and there are as many versions of you, dear reader, as there are people capable of perceiving you as well. But how much of our being is objective, if there are thousands of versions of us floating around the planet? Is there one true image? Are they all true? Like the 5 blind men arguing over what an elephant is. One man feels the trunk and imagines the elephant as a snake, another feels its tusks and argues the elephant is hard like a stone, etc etc. Are we just another blind man who can see only part of ourselves but never the totality? Is there a singular true image of ourselves and if so would we even be able to perceive it? Are we not more blind to who we truly are than anyone else could be? Who could we feel more subjectively about than ourselves? Who would we be the most inclined to defend? Or attack for that matter? Can we know ourselves?

Here is the story I have written for myself and subconsciously told myself my entire life. Tell me if you think it is a true story.

Once upon a time there was a boy. This boy was raised in a town that resembled mostly every other town. In the town there were people that were very nice to the boy and there were people that were very mean to the boy. The boy found these people inside of his school, inside of his church, inside of his home. The boy found bad people in the school and stopped believing in the school as a place for education. The boy found bad people in the church and stopped believing in the church as a place for morality. The boy found bad people inside of his home and stopped believing in the home too. The boy grew older and lived a life identical to all the other boys in all the other towns, all alike. And when the boy was old enough to leave, he did. He escaped his town and he believed that he was going to find a place that was different from where he left. The boy traveled far and wide across the country and realized that everywhere is the same except one place, nature.

Nature, where he cried on his mothers shoulder as an infant, the place he would run off to when skipping school, the world he would spend months in as his first act as an independent. Simple words - trees, birds, sunlight, moonlight, stars, blue water, blue sky, wind, rock, soil, bugs. These words have never disappointed me, they have never once betrayed me. Human life is comprised of the ideal, on one end, and reality on the other and they will never be completely aligned, no matter how much any of us try. But in nature, that vague all-encompassing word, nature, the thing is the ideal. There is no separation. There is no hypocrisy. There is absolute consistency, reliability, and truth. Nature - the rolling hills, grass blowing in the wind, the dark forest, lichen on rock, the waves of the ocean, the ripple when a singular leaf falls onto the pond’s surface. It is indisputable truth, it is Godliness, it is perfection, it is absolute.

Now more than ever, I am faced with questions that are absolutely essential. What do I do? How do I live? How do I want to die? Do I want to spend my remaining days living inside of this desecrated city? Do I want to spend my reduced lifespan hooked intravenously to the dancing screens and advertisements? Being cancer-free is supposed to be ecstasy but it is not. You are reintroduced to a world, a world you already mistrusted, but now you are diminished, unrecognizable to yourself, your body is calcified with physical pains you wouldn’t have been able to fathom a year ago, and emotional scars that prick into you when you least expect it. You are expected to be jolly and merry but the world seems further away now than when you had it.

Now that I am cancer-free there is only a slim 2% chance of it coming back! Well doctor, there was less than a 1% chance of getting testicular cancer to begin with, so telling me that there is a 2% chance feels like the difference between a 100% chance of getting it and a 200% chance of getting it and they chuckle and assure me not to worry. “You’re in good hands Mr. Robison, we will be monitoring you for the rest of your life.” The rest of my life. I will be old and all of the older doctors who saved my life will be dead and I will be just another old man in the hospital some time in the future and now I watch my life turn into a statistic, medical data, percentages, vials of blood, and the medical technology will improve until the treatment I received will seem archaic. And I have a standard, average life ahead of me to look forward to but the shadow of this experience will always be there and the health problems to expect when I’m older. We are all promised death. Maybe it just took a doctor telling me, oh by the way you’re gonna die too, to really open my eyes. My time is limited, how do I want to spend it? And there is only one answer, I want to spend more of it outside.

I remember Jules and I, on some unknown stretch of Southern California in June around 11AM, the heat was unbearable so we hid in the shade of a wall in a wash and we had to crunch into the fetal position to fit entirely within the shade and I remember watching the shade shrink and we diminished ourselves to fit into the shrinking shade until eventually the sun hit its zenith and our refuge from the heat raptured leaving us two fools laying in a hot ditch together.

I remember when we had to create our own route out of some nasty hot stretch of Montana to get Courteney off the trail and how despite the severity of the situation, I remember how light I felt and how it was one of the few times I was actually present with her while hiking and not hiking faster than her and stressing about miles. We were running out of water and goddamn it was so hot and inevitably we did run out of water. We were off trail so there were no maps downloaded, no water reports, but we walked through what was essentially a marsh, tall grass growing out of black mud and we used her filter and were filtering the water out of the mud and the mud was so thick and it broke her filter almost immediately so she chugged what water she had and we kept moving. Eventually we made it to a campsite on a lake and were lucky enough to get a ride from two kind strangers with two kind dogs and she and I rode in the backseat of a pick-up and Courteney and the strangers smoked some weed and I remember her and I, grinning ear to ear, dogs in our laps, riding through the sage fields and watching the cattle. They took us to a small town, don’t even remember its name, where she bought me my trusty Montana hat and we ate some pies and hitched out to another town. And this is all officially just rambling but I remember how present I was with her those few days and how those were among the best days of my life.

I could go on writing random little nature memories that make me smile, and maybe that’s what my next post will be, just a safe little place for them all to rest. But I am going to end this post by saying this about what little slice of life I’ve lived.

A lot can happen in a year. You can march through mountains, cold rains, stifling heat, get smacked with a disease you can’t comprehend, you can find love, you can move to a big city and then one day you will realize that all of it - the mountains, the love, the cancer, they are all gone and you are washed with grief, relief, remorse, confusion, all woven together into one impossibly large experience called humanity and you can try your best to fit it all into a story that makes sense but then you would be doing just that, telling yourself another story.