 Image by Benyamin Bohlouli on Unsplash in that small waiting room, each occupant half-enrobed in a somehow sinister mauve. We’ve entered curtained-off sectors and removed our tops and bras and covered ourselves in one-size-fits-alls, with their gaping necklines and tiny ties that cannot shield us. We’ve inserted our displaced clothing into our chosen lockers. Will we remember our locker numbers? We may not remember our numbers unless they’re helpfully written on the worn pieces of wood attached to our locker keys. We grip that wood more tightly than we might realize as we take our chairs, three here, four there, edging the room. We don’t think to check whether our locker numbers are written on the wood or not. Our eyes gravitate to a television in the corner, where a cooking show offers light-hearted chatter. We need that lightness because waiting in this room does not simply feed impatience. It feeds terror and prayer and a pitching of the mind, from attempted optimism to malignant imagery and all that might ensue: a biopsy proving what they’ve caught; months and months upended; slashing, burning, poisoning, weakness, visible illness; then the slow crawl back to normalcy, or as close as we can get, if we’re able to crawl at all. As they arrive or return after their names have been called, some women say hello to the others in the room. A newcomer sits with brittle poise; another, with heavy resignation. Some who’ve been here longer may know who’s yet to get any pictures and who’s waiting to hear about the results of their pictures and who’s been called back for more pictures—“the doctor just wants a few more pictures”—and who has returned from a nearby room in which ultrasounds are performed and discussions held, the one doctor on duty periodically approaching and leaving in her clicking heels. They’re the only clicking heels in the place, at least on the morning I’m talking about, so those heels in the hallway sound like doom being visited upon one of the women who had needed extra pictures. We could free our tops and bras. Try our keys in every lock. But we’d still be at risk, however we’re shaped, in whatever position we wait. So, we cede ourselves to this life-saving/-shattering process. The clicking of heels. The meting out of doom. Perhaps I shouldn’t say doom because I’ve faced and survived a breast cancer diagnosis. So far? Entering with two double As and emerging with one and three-quarters or so, without chemo. Yes, I was luckier than most. But it didn’t feel like luck at the time. And it doesn’t feel like luck now when I’m called back for more pictures—technically, “better pictures.” A very experienced mammographer has taken up my case because the minimal tissue that can be pressed between those planes of hard plastic requires an expert hand, guiding my position at the machine and positioning me within it. I spare my husband the turning knob, the ratcheting pressure on flesh, the suffocation of held breath…. He’s already wincing, and I haven’t even gotten to the worst of it yet. The worst of it, I explain, is the waiting after the second set of pictures. The heels on the floor tiles. The woman who returns after a stint in the nearby room and hopes things go well for us, all of us in the waiting room right then. Things have not gone well for her, she confesses—she cannot help but tell us—but somehow, she manages to wish the best for us. He’d asked me how things went. Could any of us have simply said, “okay”? I’m still not sure what exactly happened in that room after the woman spoke. Did someone muster a word of comfort? Did time go silent for everyone, or only me? I have a blurry image of our wounded comrade disappearing with her coat and purse. Then nothing: until I’m released with a paper bearing an “x” in the “benign appearing” box. Perhaps my desperate relief could be seen in the shiver of my key, the clutching of my things, the haste with which I abandoned our uniform. I had no words for anyone else just then. I wanted every second left for myself.
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 Image via Pixabay by fernandozhiminaicela She flattened her back against the wall, arms planted and slightly askew, fingers splayed, head pressed in profile like a cartoon character, or maybe more like an FBI agent about to leap around the corner, gun cocked. The remains of a potted plant lay recklessly across the floor and up the wall where earth and leaf lingered. Just moments before the upheaval, the pot had sat steady on the corner of a counter and the plant reached its limbs towards artificial light. She was mad, my mother. She said she was going to strangle herself with her purse, drown herself in the pool, throw herself under a bus.After hurling the potted plant, she went for Agnes and grabbed her around the neck until frantic caregivers pried her away. It’s the disease, Connie said, when she called. Don’t worry, she said, it’s the disease, she said. We all love your mother, and I loved her for saying that, but my hands flew to my face, and my insides tumbled and spilled across the floor. ~ Connie, the assisted living director, told me I was their poster girl. I brought sunshine in the door and laughter to the fourth floor. She told me I didn’t fuss around playing nursemaid. I visited. I danced. I sang. I read books. I dressed up and hula-hooped. I wasn’t afraid to come and have fun. But I was afraid. I was afraid every time I visited my mother. I was afraid of my mother’s dementia, afraid of her pain, afraid of not knowing what to do, of not doing enough, of not being able to delight her the way I had always been able to do. I was afraid of saying goodbye. She hated goodbye. “I won’t be here when you get back,” my mother said to me. And she shouted my name down the elevator shaft and I could hear her from the ground floor. On the fourth floor, the dementia floor, the knives, the scissors, and the hammer were locked behind glass in green felt pockets. But you can’t lock up someone’s hands, or stop them from kicking, or throwing a glass, or heaving a potted plant. ~ She was sad, my mother. A caregiver had encouraged me to leave while my mother read, Paddle to the Sea, with Ester, another kind caregiver. “Your mother is distracted,” she said. This might be a good time for you to slip away.” “But I didn’t say goodbye. And she might come looking for me.” “It might be easier this way. She won’t remember you were here.” But she did. I slipped out while Ester read, “The Canadian wilderness was white with snow.” I backed out of the room and ran to the exit and pressed the secret code and snuck down the back stairs like a thief and left my mother paddling to the sea with Ester. But, I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say, I love you, Mummy, and she didn’t say, I love you, back. Just before Christmas, my mother woke in the middle of the night, and in bare feet and a yellow smocked nightgown, she traipsed after Helen, a new fourth floor resident. My mother followed Helen down a dimly lit hall and tapped her on the back. “Where are you going?” my mother said. Tap Tap Tap. But Helen, her long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, didn’t turn or speak. My mother tapped Helen again and again and Helen swung around and shoved my mother with both hands and my mother tumbled to the floor, her right leg crumpled beneath her. Fractured. At three in the morning, I found my broken mother in a hospital cubicle, shivering without a sheet. She waved her left arm in the air, clutched her right leg with her right hand and cried, “Hello. Hello. Somebody!” “Oh, Mum, I’m here. I’m right here.” ~ I woke up beside my mother on St Patrick’s Day, her favourite day, and I finger painted her chapped lips with a drop of white wine and fastened a shamrock pendant around her neck. She died at noon. When the coroner arrived, she insisted on an autopsy. “Oh, please don’t do that,” I said. “Please. She’s been through enough.” But the coroner said they needed to know the cause of death. They needed to know if it was Helen’s fault. “It’s no one’s fault,” I said. “It’s the disease.”
 Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash I have oil stains on my frayed hem. On Fridays I smell sour, metallic. On Saturdays I smell like Tide detergent. On Sundays my fabric grows stiff. On good days, after vegetable picking and an early lunch, I smell like sunshine and air when I am hung outside. The family is at Clam King, and the little girl eats grilled cheese. I hate it because I am not there, I am not being worn, I am the workday armor. I am not needed at Clam King. I am outside a house, hanging in the sun, dancing in the wind as if I were not strong at all, as if I were beautiful. I am not made for sunshine; I am not made for dancing. I am armor, and I feel forgotten. I see the man when he comes home. Beige pants. Pleated and embarrassing. He pretends he does not need armor; he pretends that he can wear loafers and laugh over lunch. He will wear me again soon, but I don’t recognize him without me. I see questioning postures and a laugh that doesn’t meet his eyes. Those days of beige pant performances were like a school play where everyone forgets their lines. The little girl cries. The mommy gets drunk on bloody marys and the man is not wearing the right costume. During summer they take day trips. I go to the beach, I am navy blue, and hot in the sun, unable to soak in the saltwater. I am a bog, I am a shield, I am armor. The little girl looks at me funny, so dark against his pale skin. He takes off his shirt but slouches his shoulders. Tucks himself in and under an umbrella. I did not get removed. Not here. The little girl hates me, she doesn’t understand why I am not a pair of Bermuda shorts, with bright florals that scream and laugh in the waves. Sea mist and boardwalks. She does not know why I am not a swimsuit. Saltwater and chafed thighs. The little girl crawls on the sand, puts her head under the green nylon chair, she stares at my navy blue the way it punches out of the spaces in the fabric. Both a blindfold and a bullet. She hates me. She hates me because she has never seen her father’s knees. She hates me because she has heard the words shrapnel, she has heard the words scars, but she doesn’t know what that means, she doesn’t know what I protect. She doesn’t know I am armor with oil-stained hems, I fight an invisible battle, an invisible war. I cover legs that didn’t walk for months, I cover legs with wounds that never quite heal, wounds that are wrapped tight, wounds that smell like almonds, and swamp water. She is a little girl; I am armor.
hiraeth: n. - Welsh English; deep longing for a person or thing which is absent or lost  Photo by Billy Williams on Unsplash It started with a dining room table and chairs, enough for a small dinner party where we would converse about the composition of novels or maybe music or film (not movies, but film or cinema). I even bought furniture for the front room of the house I was renting, a closed-in porch that pretended to be a sunroom, but was too hot when the sun was out, too cold when the winters of Indiana settled in. Nobody ever sat on the couch, and I never occupied the chair, save for in my imagination when we moved from the table to have dessert and discussions about politics or art or other Important Issues. Or maybe it began when I looked through catalogs: one from public radio with shirts emblazoned with Not now, Carmen, I’m Bizet or Books: The Original Hand-Held Device and ties modeled from Frank Lloyd Wright designs or one from Levenger filled with barrister bookcases with a B chiseled into the glass and fountain pens that cost more than the engagement ring I bought for my first wife, the one who would leave before I could ever afford one shelf, even without the engraving. I fell in love with skyscrapers and public transportation, so I traded in the mountains for a metropolis, of sorts. And now when I go home, or a place that looks like it—difficult to tell the difference—the one-fingered wave on the steering wheel that once welcomed me home has transformed into a finger flipped at a foreign entity with bumper stickers for the other side. Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed. In “Thinking as a Hobby,” William Golding writes, “It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.” To a boy from Carter County, Tennessee, who ended up in graduate school in the Humanities, it was impossible to know what a different life could look like, so I missed a world I never had, a world where books matter more than football scores, where philosophers filled my mind more than the family I left behind. I never knew what I had lost. I never knew what I had gained. I never knew which was which.
 Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash I didn’t believe Jamie would beat you up, find you with his fists after school even though I told him to, every day for a few weeks. I treated life like the Atari video games that were just becoming popular, something like Chopper Command, where we would hit reset every time we made a mistake all so we could make another and another and another. He told me about it on the bus ride home; we were proud of ourselves. If I saw the students I teach behaving that way, I would want to shake them until their self-satisfaction fell off their faces and rolled down the hallway, never to be seen again. I’ve passed middle age by now, so I wear self-righteousness on a too regular basis, as if I never made such mistakes myself. But what can I say for the self I was then? I was young and I was dumb and I wanted not to be on the bottom of the popularity pyramid for at least one moment, I wanted to know what it felt like to be aligned with Jamie and Alan and Joey who beat me up like it was their hobby, beat me up on a rotation like the universe had employed them to keep me in my place, and I thought that I could show that you were beneath us all—though that was already obvious to everyone, even me—and I was mean, though I didn’t know it then, and I wanted somebody else to suffer like I did, that feeling of wonder that came over me when I looked at other boys talking and playing with ease, without wondering what everybody was thinking about them all the time and when my parents sent me to your house to explain—as I had said over and over that I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it—your mother didn’t believe me because she knew me better than I knew myself, but you forgave me and I was almost in tears and I said I was sorry; I was sorry; I was so so sorry, and I never did anything like it again. But I know enough now to know I didn’t change—I’m still mean and I’m still dumb—but at least I rearranged what I worry about: popularity isn’t a priority; people’s opinions are as fickle as a boy who turned on his next door neighbor just to prove he could. And my ego has never recovered from the beating I gave it that night.
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