Cut from the River

They cut it out. A positive skin cancer i.d.’d for what had seemed nothing more than a small irritation on my face. They take the three stitches out today and tell me it’s all okay. As the beautiful-in-spirit doctor announces, “you’re good”.

In the language of the biopsy test results it’s a “hypertrophic actinic keratosis with early invasive squamous cell carcinoma”. I read the typed sheet and take it in.

The word ‘squamous’ is enough to make me feel sick, close to a word like ‘squeamish’ and somehow reminiscent of guts and internal mess. I don’t know why, but I think of being a boy, fishing off an industrial wharf on Newcastle harbour. A bucket with our gains. Voices, the smell of salt, the stained pylons holding us above.

My encounter with the big ‘C’ is minor, fleeting, lucky. What was on my face - and now removed - akin to a single glittering scale on a fish’s body.

I know of many friends who have suffered profoundly, regular visitors to Lifehouse, chemo souls whose skin gets so irritated they feel their fingertips touching things as if they’re caressing needles... the dear presence of my sister, most of all, losing her strength, losing her hair, recovering ever so slowly.

Sometimes I feel like cancer is everywhere these days. A reality and a premonition of some larger wrong in the world. So many I know and love, sent to this other place … never able to fully return, one foot there and one foot here. Not so lucky as me.

When I dwell on them, their faces shimmer and make me sad. As if I am seeing them in a reflection caught across the silver of a pool of water. I can’t quite touch them or they will disappear. I’m near, but I am far away.

I have been thinking lately of the saying “character is destiny”. Apparently it’s derived from the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. This information made me tune into one of those BBC In Our Time podcasts to find out more about his thinking. Other familiar sayings swam into his name: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Aphoristic and paradoxical, Heraclitus believed in unities. Apparently the old Greek word for ‘life’ is also the same as ‘bow’, depending on where you place the accent when you say it.

Life aims towards death, awakeness to sleep. And yet both ends reward the wonder of the reverse also being true - with the illusory idea of any beginning only deceiving us. The bow draws back the arrow; the arrow flies. Of which are you a part of? Are you seeing and sending; or are you arriving? You are always doing both.

It’s wonderful, slightly windy, Sydney winter’s day. I walk the pavement to my car after my more-or-less positive diagnosis, cut free from a problem.

I listen to young band from Adelaide called Swapmeet, indie pop rock with exceptional lyrics about early 20s romance, share houses, rain, sand, relationship breakups, and sitting on the floorboards “of a run down kitchen”.

It reminds me of the crazy, passionate, learning ways of my own early 20s, as if these experiences remain eternal for every generation to experience and know. I step into the same river twice with their songs. But the river flows fast and that feels okay too - older here, though I am not sure wiser, on a backstreet in Newtown searching in the warm sun for where I parked my car.

I double back and find the street I forgot. I touch my face and the new scar upon it with the utmost delicacy. I sing, in some half-formed and secret way, for all those I love and carry with me into another day.

M