Up. Right.

Minutes. 

Hours, maybe.

I get to choose how long I remain upright in the world.

I get to choose where I spend my spoons, today.

Walk a block, or stand and deliver.

Lift my silly little nephew out of his seat, or sit in the theatre: not both.

I get to choose, now.  I get to pace myself and measure my steps.

Measuring life from one painkiller to another.  

I used to mark my life from one show to the next. 

Now it's from one pill to the next, one treatment to the next.

I know it happens to everyone.  I'm grateful it isn't something more terrifying yet.

I guess I thought I would have had a little more time upright.

I get to choose now, whether to grieve all the things I don't get to do anymore, 

Or celebrate the things I did and cherish every single moment that I get now.

I love how slow my world has become.  I get to live with so much more intention now.

I can't blindly say 'yes' to everything anymore now, so given the choice:

I'll measure my life in love. 

A Litany for Pain.

Is fear the thing that becomes the mind-killer?

Or is it Pain?

For whose little death truly brings total annihilation?

Pain becomes that pinpoint focus, 

And that mad abandon in search of some relief

It becomes everything and nothing and the space in-between.

I am focused on only breathing, and beating my wings against this flood.

Oh god, how it floods.

Pain is brilliant, and dwelling and insistent and enveloping

It is controlling and encompassing and devouring.

I will open my arms to Pain.  I will watch its path as it burns

Every part of me I am not sure of.

It reduces the best and the worst and the uncertainties 

Down to only what matters most:

Love.

Hope.

I will open my soul to Pain as it washes me clean of any trappings of desire.

Anything I wanted that doesn't serve me, 

Anything I am that isn't sure or whole or perfect gets burned down to its core.

"And where Pain has gone, there will be nothing."

Only Love will remain.

Go home.

Insidious, disastrous.

Catastophrous, even.

Brilliant and humbling, I grasp at straws, at my own breath

Gasping for some kind of relief.

It's not that the pain is sharp or really even all that intense

It is the relentlessness that wears me down.

It's a long-flowing stream of water that wears away rock.

It's a ceaseless wind drifting the sand ever so smoothly.

Slowly it chips away at my soul, at my body, at my life.

I am discouraged.  I am losing hope in a way I never have before.

Aging faster than I ever dreamed.

I am learning to lean hard.  Lay down and lean in.  

Listen to my body when it says no.

Maybe it's all a farce, you see.  My body screaming the quiet part out loud...

Go home.