cancer – day 50

Wow, 50 days. Still less than two months. That’s so wild, it feels like it’s been more like six months since this all started.

It’s been a relief to unexpectedly have at least a couple more weeks post-surgery before treatments and stuff get going. And I’m pretty much not sick anymore with that nasty cold, so now it’s like I get those couple of weeks I thought I was going to have before chemo after all. Today we went running errands for house stuff to make Mark’s place more, umm, livable, for me. A toaster (toasted oven actually, which is something I’ve never used in my life, but hey, as long as I can have toast with my eggs again, a toaster oven instead of a toaster is just fine with me), a fan for my office (wow, does it get hot at the back of the house), a wall mirror for the bedroom (guys obviously don’t need to look in a full-length mirror to decide if a particular pair of shoes look cute with a particular dress before they go out dancing), a laundry hamper . . .

“I need one two, right?” Mark looked puzzled. “No.” Now I’m puzzled. I had considered just taking my dirty clothes home every week and doing my laundry there, but that didn’t seem like something Mark would expect me to do, it’s just the kind of thing I think about, little Miss Independent. “We only need one” he tells me. This had never occurred to me. Wow, the things I am naïve about are truly astounding, eh? All the years I lived with Artie, I would throw his clothes in the machine with mine and vice versa, sure, but I always had my own laundry basket (then again, Artie had THE stinkiest feet on the planet, we had to put his socks inside a plastic bag inside the closet, otherwise they would have contaminated our clothes! Before we lived together, he used to put his socks outside my apartment door at night, the smell was so bad. Right after he died, one of the few really good laughs Philip, Paul, Genevieve, and I had was remembering how stinky his feet would get in those old black sneakers, ruining all his socks.)

The idea of combining clothes in one laundry hamper at Mark’s hadn’t even occurred to me. So now I’m thinking in the store about how I have two baskets at home, one for whites and one for colors, and how I wash everything in cold and hang almost everything to dry rather than putting much in the dryer and wondering how the heck I’m going to either let someone else wash my clothes or else include theirs with mine. (I am notorious for only washing clothes every six weeks or so when I finally run out of underwear. It’s a good thing I have two bedrooms, because one bed or the other is always buried in clean not-yet-folded laundry!) And it’s not like we’d get our clothes confused by sharing the laundry hamper, but it still felt weird to imagine throwing my dirty clothes in with someone else’s. All this flashes through my mind in an instant and I ask Mark, “can we have a separate one for lights and one for darks?” He laughs at me, shaking his head a little, “all right.”

Not under the pressure of starting chemo immediately, now the whole preparing-to-live-at-Mark’s-for-treatment thing suddenly has a different vibe for me. It feels more like a moving-in-with-Mark kind of vibe that I hadn’t really paid any attention to before, if it was even there. I couldn’t quite get my mind around that today. So much so that, tired as I was, I couldn’t nap this afternoon because I was anxious about this “moving in together” feeling. I’ve managed to emotionally stay away from this kind of relationship for five and a half years now, no one has been close enough to me that I would change my life so dramatically to choose to live with them. (And no, the few months I was married shortly after Artie’s funeral don’t count, I was still on massive doses of anti-depressants and out of my mind with grief, and the guy moved in to my house without really changing things much or ever getting to know me very well).

I haven’t brought it up with Mark in any detail, this anxiety I suddenly had about this feeling like moving in together instead of just being there so he can care for me during treatment. I’m not quite sure how to bring it up with him. (I should do it before I post this blog though, if we’re going to talk about it instead of he just reading about it later!) Either he’s already comfortable with the idea of living together or he’s thinking, like I had been all along, that it’s temporary and that I’ll go home to my old quiet life at my property when all this treatment stuff is over. But Mark doesn’t act like that, like he expects me to leave after it’s over. It’s more the opposite, it’s more like he’s assumed me into his life, like, he always uses “we” and “us” in conversation with other people when making plans to do things or whatever. And, this was fun because of how happy he seemed to be to tell me . . . last weekend he said that I’m growing on him, he’s getting used to having me around all the time. After some of the more difficult conversations we had a while back about relationship commitment (aha! another important conversation in my journal that didn’t make it to the blog), it was one of those unimportant important things to say.

So anyway, I’m wondering about this stuff and if I should try to talk to Mark about these feelings and how, but I’m also realizing that it doesn’t have to be a big thing, that it’s not really something that has to be “talked about” and a resolution found. Maybe I’ll ask him tomorrow how he feels about it, but we already know we’re doing this living arrangement during treatment, however long that is, and there will certainly be enough time to worry about the living-together side of things later after my cancer treatments are over. Meanwhile, the big picture is that I’m just lucky to have him and to be here, and once in a while I have to remember to remind myself of that.

You know, there are these times where I just have to get over myself, get out of my own way, and not think about everything so much. I’ve told my parents more than once about how my life always works itself out for the best if I just get out of my own way and let it happen, not try to “make” things happen. It’s also kind of true of the way I analyze things. I ponder stuff and let it turn over and around in my mind, but the more I can let go of worrying about what it is or how it will turn out, the more enjoyable things are and the more they seem to work out for the best on their own. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’s important to try to be a good person: kind, generous, forgiving, patient (note I didn’t say I AM any of those things, but I do try to be), but much as my mind turns on and around these things of what’s going on in my life and my feelings on all of that, when it comes down to doing anything, I still try to tell myself to just try to be a good person, to experience the path life is leading, and to not create any more pain in this world where so many people say and do so many hurtful things in so many small ways all the time. Life isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a journey to experience.