Treasure

this post is written in gratitude to Linda Sharps, whose bravery inspires me daily

- You can catch up here, if you need to - 

I'm beginning to feel different than everyone. Not lonely, but apart. There has been this aesthetic trend in the past year or so, you see it on social media mostly, to display a life that appears dainty and muted, every tiny detail presented in a manner that is off-handed yet quasi-sacred, rustic but always so very dainty. It seems as if there are whole armies out there of slightly more lackluster Gwenyth Paltrows, faces covered by the oversized brim of a sunhat, eating a tiny meal at a long white table decorated with neatly folded linens, populated by a dozen or so beautiful if slightly wan looking thirty-somethings.

From the looks of it, their sweet and effortless lives involve plucking a single daisy and poking its long, slender stem into a milk-glass bottle, wrapping babies origami-style in swathes of fabric, catching on film a single chip of rainbow light, cast from a twirling prism, as it journeys across a vast white wall, re-wrapping the babies, perhaps a single leek for lunch, or a lilac-tinted endive clutched in a child's small and earnest fist, extended and photographed against the same ocean-wide white wall.

I'm envious. 

I'm envious because I can't even stage that kind of existence, much less live it day in and day out, and it seems so very tempting. Even with its all its irritating qualities, it's faux-humble gentility, it still manages to somehow appeal to me. How pretty and soothing; how far from my grasp. 

Everything in my life right now is so vivid. That's the only way I can think to describe it. I woke up a few nights ago with a bright red eye, a yellowish, blood-tinged tear slowly oozing down the side of my nose. You hardly even notice these things anymore. The cystitis has returned with a vengeance; I sleep with an ice pack between my legs. It's hard to appear dainty when you sleep with an ice pack between your legs.

We drove to Vermont a few days ago, stopping for the night at motel outside of Harrisburg whose blinking neon sign was barely ten yards away from the shoulder of I-81. For the first time in my life, I fell asleep in the bathtub. The next morning as we rolled North the landscape grew brighter and brighter, until by the time we arrived at my parents' house the world appeared as if in technicolor, ebullient and buzzing with insects, croaking with frogs, the sky blue and marbled with traces of thin white clouds. The peonies in the garden were fat explosions of magenta, their stalks bowing under the weight of their incredible feathery heft. The fields surrounded the roads and houses in a haze of tall, citrus-hued grasses.

 David and I spent the first few days in New England constantly seeking out water. Swimming has become an absolute joy, an escape from ubiquitous pain and the only time when my heart doesn't thump against my chest like an angry rabbit. When my vision softens and fades around the edges I look for a body of water in which to dunk my head, open my eyes beneath the surface and enjoy a world that's always blurry and cool.

When I'm fully immersed in fresh, living water, the weightlessness and ecstasy of the experience overcomes me and I'm flooded with intense feelings of coziness and contentment and goodwill. The feeling of pulling myself out of the cold, clear water of the quarry and pressing my body against a slab of sun-warmed granite on my stomach is better than opioids. Swimming is a temporary cure but it is a cure nonetheless.

 We've swam in the clear blue hole beneath the iron bridge in downtown Woodstock, where the perfectly manicured lawns slope down to meet the river, and every now and then a figure will pause on the bridge below us, wave and point a camera. We've floated around Silver lake on two air-filled tires, dipped below the pollen that dusts the surface of the pond like powdered gold, jumped off the shattered shale on the steep banks of the Quechee Gorge into the icy, dark green river.

Maybe on day soon, I will have my slender daisy in the milk-glass, a quality of airy cleanliness that follows me like a soft mist, a life free and clear of the

small, perpetual horrors of Lyme disease. 

For now there is the crush of pain against relief, bright and rough, the cold shock of river water that swallows and protects me from the burning day and the treasured moments of joy and calm that blink like fireflies against a black summer sky. My life is filled with mess, filled with uncertainty, full of treasure.