Chemical Therapy

In the delirium of a hospital room, he slips away unnoticed by his all-consuming sickness out beyond these sterile walls. Drifts into the boulevard, boards a bus, goes to the beach. Or maybe he’ll ride the back of an albatross to Florence, that wonderful city of romance and history and art. But the illusion fades; he cannot deny that he is here, in a hospital room, fighting cancer. He wonders, Do we choose to be ill? Can we choose to be healthy? It has nothing to do with our cancer racked bodies, he decides. The idea of sickness is what overcomes us in the end, like a flame that quickly spreads beyond its cylinder of wax.

His flight from these thoughts are a futile act of defiance. He runs throughthe hallways , out the revolving hospital doors and down the sidewalk, hospital gown streaming behind him. He crosses against a Do Not Walk light. Cars brush through him like a whirl of ghosts. A chill creeps over him. He tries to smile and nod hello to the people that he passes. Everyone gawks at him in horror or pity. Lost in a ghost city, towering skyscrapers disappearing in mid air. In the windows the faces of ghouls laughing down on him. He begins to weep, and his body drains with the chemo down a sewer grating into the tunnels beneath. Rushing through the intestines of the city, deeper into the bowels, he is little more than a pool of screams.

And then it comes, like the burst of sunlight. Maybe it is the final mercy of a God that he didn't believe in anymore. He is skimming over ocean waves towards a shore that promises so many works of beauty. All the promises of Florence lie ahead, and despite everything he has gone through, he is smiling.