for whatever we lose, like a you or a me, it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

hOmEwaRd bOuNd. these days i feel like a frustrated child being constantly reprimanded and learning the hard way, at every turn falling down or breaking something or being admonished or corrected. most of these lessons i thought i knew, or should know by now, and yet...
careful what you wish for. i will, after much longing and much complaining, in fact, get to go home to the ocean. but not on terms or for reasons i would like. i will see the ocean and breathe in its salt air and synch my breath to its rhythms and hope that it can help to calm my troubled soul. but i will only get to do this because my mom has cancer, a spot in the back of her throat and a larger mass in a lymph node. and so i go home to care and grieve and worry and hope and heal and help. to prepare her for radiation and surgery and feeding tubes. to hold her and be held by her and try to not ever have to let go. to hurl my hurt and rage and fear against the massive atlantic.
i keep hearing sally field's voice in my head, that line from the funeral scene of steel magnolias, when she says she could run all the way to texas and back but her baby never could. and then she loses it. i am learning the same lesson. it does not matter what i do. it does not matter how strong i am, how strong i try to make myself, how healthy i try to be, it cannot save those i love, it cannot change what they have gone through, what they are going through, what they will go through. and i know that when i take care of myself, when i step into that bikram studio every day, i do it to try to heal and atone for unhealthy things i have done to myself and to keep myself protected from my genetic disposition to things like heart disease and cancer, but i also think part of myself is trying in futility to make up for the fact that for no good reason at all my father's heart gave out on him when he was only 41. and that here my mom is, not even 60, and battling cancer for the second time. and it is not fair.