By Bryan C.
I used to think I understood the body. I spent years tracing its logic, memorizing its patterns, believing that if I learned enough, I could stay on the safe side of uncertainty. Then one day the uncertainty moved inward, and the map I had relied on for so long folded in on itself.
Now I live in a different kind of time. Not the kind measured in rounds or lab results, but a slower, stranger rhythm. Some mornings I wake and feel almost untouched. Other mornings I feel the shadow before I even open my eyes, as if something has rearranged itself in the night.
People ask how I am, and I answer in ways that make sense to them. Stable. Managing. Taking it day by day. But the truth is less linear. I feel like I am walking through a corridor where the lights flicker, revealing only pieces of the path at a time.
I used to believe illness was something that happened to other bodies. Now I understand it is also something that happens to time, to memory, to the way I inhabit myself.
There are moments when I feel like I am dissolving at the edges, not disappearing exactly, but becoming more porous. The world seeps in differently. A cup of tea tastes sharper. A conversation lingers longer. Silence feels heavier, as if it is holding something I am not yet ready to name.
I have learned that fear does not always forewarn you that it was coming. Sometimes it comes as a when you are discreetly rearranging your priorities. A sudden tenderness toward things I once rushed past. The way sunlight falls on the kitchen counter. The sound of my wife humming in another room. The simple fact of waking up.
I used to think healing was a direction. Now I think it is a shape, shifting constantly, sometimes expanding, sometimes collapsing, sometimes holding me in ways I do not fully understand.
People assume illness clarifies things. It does not. It distorts them. It bends the familiar into unfamiliar angles. It makes the future feel both too close and impossibly far. But in that distortion, I have found a strange kind of attention. A way of noticing the world that feels almost like reverence.
I do not pretend to be a superhero who will heal the world. I am not. I am simply here, moving through a landscape I never expected to enter, learning its language one letter at a time.
Some days I feel like a doctor again. Some days I feel like a patient. Most days I feel like someone who has stepped out of his own life and is slowly finding the doorway back.
Art by Gioia Albano, “The Face Behind”Â
About the Author
Bryan writes to understand the parts of healing that live between words.