40%: Night of One Act Plays

At 5am my crazy sleep (a three hour nap yesterday despite a mega steroid dose that should have sent me churning around the apartment; falling asleep for the night despite the nap by 10:30 which is a record for me under normal circumstances) caught up to me. The warning on the bottle says side effect: insomnia. This isn't what they meant, I think, but it's close enough. The alarm goes off in an hour, three hours too damn early if you ask me, but I am already lying awake and I can feel there's no hope of any more sleep before I start this day.

This week. A radiation dose first thing, and then back to playing at real life, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Will it be enough, as the week progresses, the radiation? To keep this awful last ditch attempt at bay of my bastard cancer to cause me misery?

Something strange happens while I'm lying there though. My thoughts open up and take a shape: the night of one act plays my school put on in 10th grade. Caught up in my memories of this night are a handful of the narrative elements that propelled me through that year. My hopelessly unrequited amour for my best friend's girlfriend, for one, who shot me in the heart that night with an a cappella song inspired by a rape. And the play I had tried to direct, a visualization of a poem I didn't like or understand, which I had been talked into by one of the few people at that place who could make me feel intellectually insecure. I suffered from a dearth of good ideas or interested actors, so I abandoned the piece, only to watch it be put on (much to my surprise) under the assumed leadership of the head actress, who I rather despised and who had missed several key rehearsals.

The coup was mainly an annoyance. I was glad to have my name detached from the project. I got a lot more ambivalent about theater that night, thinking how collaborative it's supposed to be and seeing what happens when you lack strong creative direction. I was starting to get that I was a writer only, though it would talk similarly disastrous forays into TV production to bring the point home. Any project I worked on, it was like either I had to tell everyone what to do and they resented it, or I had nothing to say so nothing happened. Writing is between me and the page; it's just a safer gambit. I only ever let down myself.

It was strange and familiar to lie awake like this, my past opening up to put on a little show. I'm usually quite the dweller on things, and have wrecked many a good night agonizing over much best left untouched. Now that time has passed, though, a harmless reverie to pass the time, reconnect some neurons and remember where I came from -- it was welcome. What was so odd about it is that I feel like it hasn't happened in so long that I'd just stopped being that person. For months, waking up in the middle of any part of the day or night, my thoughts have run first and last to my stomach, my lymph nodes, my dripping sweat or at least my hair, which nightly migrates from my head to my face.

The extra challenges of what my body puts me through during the day and the extra anxiety about where it's all going, when it's ever going to end, if I'll ever feel normal again... that's the new normal I've long since adapted to. I don't let my thoughts run much farther back than October and it's impossible to focus them past the next few days. Mostly I just consider what happened in a TV show I watched recently while I take some more Ativan. Even the books I started when the chemo first began to wore off have been left largely untouched.

Everything is cancer, everything else is on hold, except for half an hour this morning when I should have been asleep and for whatever reason, I went back into the past and for a time remembered that I used to be something else.