Straight Lines

It’s been a week. I haven’t done much besides lie on the couch/bed, and when I’m not doing that I’m sitting on the edge of the couch/bed trying to get up off the couch/bed. It seems like that’s what I do most of the day- sit on the side of the couch/bed, stare at my feet, and contemplate getting up for more pills/food/hydration.

Then there was the usual nausea and forcing myself to eat, bone pain (but not as intense as last time), dizziness, ringing of the ears, fatigue, dry mouth, and generally feeling like I just woke up on a stranger’s floor with only one sock and somebody else’s T-shirt after an all-night bender with the flu. I’m learning how to better manage all this with medication, though, and it’s all starting to feel routine. It’s sad but true: feeling absolutely awful is becoming normal. I feel awful right now.

In my sometimes losing but ongoing efforts to keep my head screwed on straight, though, I was reminded of a quote this week that gives me hope. C.S. Lewis said that, “a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line”. He was talking about his nagging sense of how broken the world is proves the existence of something unbroken, namely God, and I think it works the same way for me. What I mean is, my world is really messed up right now. It’s filled with disease and lots of needles and not a little suffering, and my soul objects to these circumstances. It objects not just because of the unpleasant nature of the things, but because it knows it’s not supposed to be this way. It objects to the crooked line because it knows of the straight line. And this is comforting because my soul’s very objection to the crooked proves the existence of the straight. If it had never known the pleasure of a highter, straighter existence, this soul would not feel deprived by its current circumstances.

And if there’s one true thing in this world, it’s that things change. So I have to believe I’ll be back there sometime, to the place where my soul first got this idea that lines should be straight- the place where joy effortlessly flourishes and peace is assumed. Soon I’ll be back to hollering at drivers who don’t yield to my fire truck and climbing mountains only to come right back down (what a futile and pointlessly beautiful catharsis of energy!) and having conversations about anything other than cancer, moving through the days with the luxury of being absorbed in the moment’s inconsequential distractions.

God I long for that.