waiting in the grass.

I found out today that I may have cervical cancer within the next ten years. Since I woke up, this has been following me. I rode my bike up and down the streets of the town where I grew up. I had meant to go to the park, but I couldn't stop pedaling. I twisted up and down the streets beyond the railroad tracks, saw dogs playing with their owners on their lawns, children in strollers, leaves as they dropped from the trees, readying themselves for autumn.

When I got to the park, I laid my bike down on a big tree that I had once climbed at my friend's birthday party. I sat in the grass and thought of the past, of my lost intimacy with my felicitous space. How my space here, my "nest" as Bachelard would call it, is more than a house. It is the blue sky of Burlingame and the green grass and the families and the swimming pools and the freshly paved streets.

I sat in that park when I was re-united with Brian one summer, the summer of our purest affections. He came up behind me and kissed me while I sat on the grass re-reading Pride and Prejudice and listening to Radiohead on my iPod. I used to ditch class and go to that park and talk to friends. Countless picnics and dog walks took place right there. In the middle of the night, with my first boyfriend, we hid under the kid's jungle gym and stole kisses. Colin did back flips off of the new play structures. I have a photograph of Saleh on the monkey bars.

I return to that park, that extended patch of grass, and I must look again at myself, at who I am becoming. My world will shift in the next year and I will never feel this way again. I may find that I am in the early stages of cancer. My friends and I have drifted apart in the last few weeks. I find that I need purpose in my life, direction, even if that direction may be unconventional (I've been seriously considering agriculture). I find that things are not what they once were, that maybe they never were that way, maybe my nostalgia has transformed everything and made it beautiful, when the real life memories were more dirty, more impatient, more meaningless.

It has to work itself out. I have to find a way to love who I am. Because right now, my feelings are contingent upon the love I receive from others. And right now, that is the last thing I need.