I don't know how I survived cancer.
I absolutely expected to die.
I can't even explain why I bothered
with chemotherapy
(when I did not believe it would work).
I suppose I did it to comfort my mother.
Perhaps it was because I have had
a life of disappointment--
or rather, a life in which I had decided
no longer to acknowledge
the disappointment that was knit into my being
from conception.
My father married my mother
after his first wife abandoned my brothers
and ran away with a plumber,
after he had moved them all to America
with the hopes of opening a restaurant.
He never opened a restaurant.
He was the garbage and dish boy
at a restaurant for twenty years.
Disappointment.
My mother lost faith
when a married Christian mentor--
a deacon, an elder,
who she admired
asked her to run away with him.
He promised to betray his oath
to a God she believed in--
that she thought he believed in.
And then (she never said this, but I suspect)
it is likely he assaulted her
in a moment if obsessed desperation.
To see him tumble off his pedestal--
to see that no man could be as godly
as God--
Disappointment.
My parents married each other,
for twenty-one years--
with no love
no affection.
Only resentment, suspicion,
longsuffering, disgust.
I remember the day I said to my mother,
Mom, I wouldn't be here if you
and dad didn't get married,
but, it wasn't worth it.
I look at you, and I see all of this
wasted life.
If I could trade my life
for you to have a second chance--
for you to have had a marriage
full of love and joy,
even if it meant I would never exist,
I would make that trade.
Disappointment.
I was born into a marriage built upon disgust
into a home embroiled in debt.
A house in total disrepair,
infested, molded, leaking,
In a neighborhood fraught with violence
and poverty and squalor,
and a simmering fury at injustice
over the sweaty stench of desperation.
Parents raising children in a world without hope--
with an understanding that
they were inheriting a life
where they would work to eat, and eat to work.
Living a life where practicality superseded dreams
and survival superseded purpose,
and vacations were imaginary things
that you heard tell
but you'd never been on.
You worked because you woke that day
and you slept because you must work tomorrow.
Sleep, eat, work, sleep, eat, work;
a world without flavor
a life without hope.
My entire life has been a practice
of living without living.
But I am alive;
I just don't know how
or why.
