Postcards Fragments
By the third count, people stop asking how you are with sincerity. The questions are ceremonially standing for an anthem nobody listens to anymore. Even I had begun answering myself mechanically. Fine. Managing. Grateful. Language filtered through wellness long after the spirit has vacated the moment.
Fragments. A goat standing inside morning fog is a meticulously bleating philosopher. Rain gathering over red soil. Avocados split open casually on a kitchen table. A wheelbarrow overturned near eucalyptus trees.
Once, simply, Kasi told me: “The cows escaped again. Your people are dramatic.”
I would laugh harder than the message deserved. That frightened me slightly.
Illness affects humor first. Before appetite or sleep. Before hope itself. You are laughing at strange things because ordinary joy has become too expensive metabolically.
I love messages that have no range of encouragement or motivational warfare. Zabee sometimes writes to me as though I still belong to ordinary life. This may be the most tender thing one human being can offer another person trapped inside prolonged illness: continuity.
Last session had the chemo entering my body with cold governance. Everything is administrative. Water tasted strategic. Sleep is me on a bed of nails. My bones developed Kilimani concrete piles. Entire afternoons disappeared into fatigue so complete it felt as though dread was a house I kept accidentally furnishing.
Hospitals change your relationship with time catastrophically. Minutes expand obscenely inside waiting rooms yet months dissolve instantly afterward. One day bleeds into another until memory resembles wet ink and still the world continues its unrelated business offensively. People flirt in supermarkets. Children lose sweaters. Mangoes ripen without consulting my prognosis.
At first this angers me. Then eventually it saves me.
Because illness secretly tempts narcissism. Not vanity exactly. Centrality. The dangerous belief that suffering should interrupt existence itself. But outside the ward, jacaranda trees are shedding irresponsibly onto parked cars. Men continue lying confidently in barbershops. Women are dancing while peeling makeup off their faces. The universe refuses to synchronize itself around my pain.
Thank God.
Last Wednesday afternoon after treatment, I sat outside too weak to read properly. My body churns humiliations for days. I don’t trust my own legs. I can’t even button my shirts or fart without risking a radio-induced meltdown. Even breathing sometimes feels contractual rather than automatic.
I am staring upward absentmindedly simply because lifting my head requires less effort than lowering it and suddenly I understand something unbearable.
The sky does not heal anybody. It sees. Important distinction.
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People romanticize nature because they want reciprocity from it. They want the ocean to comfort them personally. Trees to understand grief. Rain to participate in their emotional wreck. But the world is older than our biographies. Clouds drift above funerals and weddings with identical indifference. Light touches hospital windows and prison bars equally. Nature does not love us individually.
Yet being seen without judgment has its own lovely mercy.
Lying here, my body invaded by chemicals with names sounding like failed dictatorships, I realize how draining self-consciousness is during illness. Everybody looking at me with interpretive eyes. Measuring my weight loss. Monitoring my tone. Studying my optimism. It is now a moral costume affecting my outcomes medically.
But the sky demands nothing of me. Not my bravery or my inspiration or my coherence. It simply remained immense while I was a figment beneath it.
And oddly, this reduces my loneliness.
I think because illness shrinks the world disastrously. A sick body is so territorial. Every sensation magnified. Every discomfort tyrannical. My yearning grows loud from proximity. Pain is deeply self-referential but occasionally something interrupts the dictatorship of my own anguish. Doesn’t cure it. Just decenters it briefly.
A bird arguing invisibly somewhere. Again. Wind disturbing leaves and children laughing several compounds away. Life remains embarrassingly alive beyond my private catastrophe.
Wanjiru understands this instinctively. Her postcards never asks me to transcend illness. They keep returning me to scale. A muddy forest path besides a choir of trees. Laundry surrendering to warm Alaska weather. Goats behaving criminally. Ordinary life continuing with such annoying fog that my pain could no longer pretend to be the only narrative occurring on earth.
One evening she sent:
“The stars barked at nothing for the thirty minutes I was outside. Void and paranoia. Or, greetings in a doctor’s handwriting.”
And for reasons I still cannot explain, I laughed afterward. Looking at this one grumpy star through the window, realizing I had almost disappeared into the machinery of being unwell.
That is the hidden danger of prolonged illness. Necessary death and disappearance. Being entirely composed of symptoms, appointments, survival statistics and pharmaceutical budget lines. You stop being a person who once desired things irrationally, loved yearningly, danced terribly, had opinions about jazz and overcooked bitter herbs with dangerous laughter. You narrow clinically.
Then somebody sends you a photograph from a farm where chicken scratch the lawn and suddenly your humanity leaks back unexpectedly through the cracks.
Fourth year after my first diagnosis, I understood companionship differently. Away from constant emotional intensity. Someone placing evidence of the world beside my suffering so I do not mistake my pain for the entire skies under whose dome I live.
A tree surviving wind somewhere. Morning blues uninvited over fields. Clouds moving without urgency. Life continuing its ancient disobedience against all of this despair.
#BirdsongPostcards
