Bread and Bread

Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash After we left the hospital, I took him back to the hospital.  His eye looks puffy, I told the pediatrician in the emergency department. (A Tuesday morning, nearly empty, but haunted by the specters of our first visit. The coughing unhoused. The vocal elderly. My own spouse with her lost voice.) I don't think the infection is back. Take a few pictures throughout the day to see if anything changes, but he's probably fine. He didn't know he was telling an alcoholic to make herself a cocktail. He didn't know that document lurks just behind fight and flight . Soon my photos were a grid of my child's face. More so than usual, I mean. Close-ups, not sliding-down-the-slide shots. His brown-black eyes and smooth brown skin. But was it smooth enough? Was that sudden blush evidence of the tantrum he just had (brother reclaiming iPad) or the creep of fever? Was that a scratch or the red slash of infection? I touched each photo and spread two ...

Photo by George Kedenburg III on Unsplash I am trying to find a new way of being in the world, but I keep worrying about my lymph nodes. For years, the wisest people—Fr. Greg Boyle, my therapists, my Instagram Explore page (okay, it is not the wisest or a person)—have preached Living In The Moment. Or rather, they have talked about it, but they haven't preached, because I don't like preachers.  Fr. Greg said, This—this here is heaven.  I thought, I will try to live in the moment in the future. The Future seemed like a kind of heaven. If I earned it, through good works and the right kind of disordered eating, I could live there unencumbered. The future would hold promises of More Future. But first I needed to be granted a pass, and that pass would look like normal-range lab results all down the page.  Maybe I've told this story before (I worry that retelling stories is a sign of brain metastasis, but it might also be proof that I need to tell myself the same stories over ...

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash If you were a snowflake— your mother a glacier, your arms branched and reaching— the photos would melt you.  The blast-orange light revealing a thrown-back head, flames marching along an IV tube, blaze branched, arm reaching. You would throw your cold body on the fire, turn to steam. You would mourn the loss, condemn the evil. But you are a fist of coal— not hard enough to become a diamond,  you are disappointment in the toe  of a bad child's Christmas stocking. And so you file the photos between Guilt and Luck in your dewey decimal mind.  Your mother was a librarian, your father an engineer. Their shared currency was worry. So when you wonder if you are dying, if your CBC is tea leaves, if animals can smell cancer,  is this self-love or -hatred?  Ego is a red herring, a lavender menace. And when you thought, But they're probably not even sick, they were probably in the hospital because of the war,  you crowned th...

1. self-care in red boots Last weekend was busy. The week that followed it was busy. It included a book club meeting at which we discussed the NPR story we’d all heard about how only white-collar people say they’re busy. People who work three minimum-wage jobs just say they’re tired. By the time I left work yesterday, I was both. Which means I was in a weakened state, and it didn’t take long for me to turn my writing evening at Philippe’s into an is-it-scar-tissue-or-cancer Googling session. It’s the absolute worst thing I can do for my mental health, but it’s like I have an addiction that’s long past the point of making me feel good— and pretty much never did. Leave it to a Klein to find an addiction that was never fun in the first place. I need 'em like a hole in my head. I need 'em to heal the hole in my head. It bugs me that my mental health is so precarious, but at least I got my Googling bender out of my system, and I decided to devote the rest of my week...