lemon yellow black

a friend of mine moved to london over a year ago. our contact, for various reasons, has been sporadic and disjointed during that time. she is currently in vancouver for a short stay (2 weeks) and i was very excited when she told me that she would have time to hook up with me while she was here.

let’s call her ‘L’. yes, we’ll call her just that.

it was so lovely to see her. there are certain people in our lives that are so easy to come toe-to-toe with. there is no regression. no need to rekindle the friendship by bringing up old and worn out jokes/ experiences that you shared ‘back in the day’. L came to my door and we hugged before even making eye contact. there were things to share.

after a few minutes at my house, we launched ourselves into my car and went to my favorite sushi restaurant. we talked about london, amsterdam, house mates, the concept of ‘the commonwealth’, journalism and places that we belong. she paid for my dinner and i told her that i would get the check next time... which is sure to be at least a year from now.

back at my place we drank bailey's on the rocks and sat in front of my computer talking about joni mitchell lyrics and the joys of mac computers. we burned some CDs and looked up song lyrics and read them to each other.

i used to write in a little journal on my computer. i had a ‘dailies’ file. it was part of my routine. over a year ago i had a particularly jarring experience and wrote an entry about it. this is what it read:

***when i told her, her eyes welled up and a hollowness filled her face. it didn’t occur to me why, and i had to ask.

“are you okay?”

“yes. i am okay, but it’s just that my very very dear friend died from the same thing less than six months ago. she was 28. you are 25.”

this is what they don’t tell you. they don’t tell you that you will die.

and maybe i want to know, just so that i have a reason to sit here for a while longer. paralyzed. maybe i want to know, just so that i can let all sorts of other questions fall away. if i don’t need to plan for my retirement, or be concerned about current weight loss fads, or worry about getting married, or find ways to teach people what i know...if i don’t need to think about these things, i would like to have someone justify my plan live out a hedonistic fantasy for my final years. i would like someone to tell me that i no longer have responsibilities in this world.

i hold people. when they cry, i pull them into me. it is not a ‘gesture’ on my part. it is an epiphany. it is one of those moments when i am not merely myself. people cry about me sometimes. i put on my game face and tell them the science, logic, and anecdotes of my life as a disease. they cry about me. they cry about things that i remind them of. and i hold them. instead of feeling numbness, i feel something else entirely. for a moment. for a minute.

her dad. and that other lady’s dad. and the best friend of a woman who i stopped in the street to ask about her shoes. they are the ones who told me that i would die. and i thank them for it.***

L’s father is one of the people that i was writing about. truth be told, L was one of the first people that i ever met who had known someone, besides me, who had multiple sclerosis. i don’t know why i let her read this when i did. i knew that i would end up crying. and i did.

despite being a fairly articulate person, i have no language to tell people where having MS has taken me. i told L that i simply do not share how i am really feeling with people because all i would do is cry. i don’t know how to say things. i don’t know how to take people where i have been. it’s not that i do not think that they would be able to understand. not that i do not think that they would empathize. i just wouldn’t know where to begin.

after three years of living with this disease one would think that i would have pulled myself together and brought my loved ones up to speed with my emotions. that is not how things have happened. as i have said to people before, i use my medical/ health experiences as comic relief... i can be clinical, anecdotal, humorous, angry.

the rest i have no words for... yet.