The terrible reality is that health is more expensive than disease in this country.

Trauma is a wound of the present, every day. — Anonymous

A member of a support group I belong to wrote this, and it is hitting me hard. I want to lie on the floor and repeat this sentence until it inhabits every cell — until my whole body knows that I understand, that I understand. That I hear it, feel it, sense it. That I know what it has lived through and still live through, often elegantly, nearly always silently, and sometimes madly, madly.

Dreamed I attended my own funeral. I looked good.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, if the suffering I’ve experienced will, somehow, be transmuted to beauty, to love, to healing—for myself or for anyone else. But tomorrow must come like kelp wrapping its lithe blades around marine life and glimmering bits of trash alike, and I must be there with it, bobbing at times, gasping for breath at times, wishing the water was colder or hotter or shallower or clearer and, much less often than I’d like, simply floating without fear in my heart, without terror in my mind.

Terror and awe. The lulling sounds of those words. Terror. Awe. Terror. Awe. A swing twitching in winter’s wind. A wooden metronome on an upright piano. Gauzy drapes sucked into and spit out of an open window.

I did not tar hope’s feathers.

Euphoric from the propofol used in this morning’s colonoscopy, I flop into bed to dream of cake and human kindness.