If I was going to die tomorrow
Published by Eunoia Review
If I was going to die tomorrow
I would leave the dishes in the sink and
dash to the dark lake, dive in headfirst
no time for toe dipping, feel the quench and
cooling rush of it, feel the coldness bite and
bathe my bones, splash my legs fast for the white
wash, shriek in glee for that girl I once knew.
I would leave the ruminations of early morning,
the sallow wallow of snooze, bounce up and watch
the birds in their morning busyness, greedily gulp the
air of one more day that life gets to live through me.
I would lie bare in the wet grass, ear to the ground
and listen for the deep cello creak of the earth, watch
a spider swirl out her silver thread on a blade of green.
I would wonder why I had waited so long
and call everyone I loved and say straight away
I love you and I’m sorry for all the mistakes
but shall we just dance now, dance out this mess?
and we would meet and eat and laugh and cry
and say: but isn’t this all wonderful, and
hasn’t all this been wonderful?
I would ask you to hold me tight at night
so no air could get between our bodies
welded now as one, and I would ask you to
name out loud all the things you loved, and
I would stay awake to listen to your sleeping
breath, steady as a heartbeat, deep as
the silence that always held me.
An extra note
I wrote this the day after a friend told me her husband had been diagnosed with stage four cancer and only had a few months to live. I couldn’t get my head around it. The next morning, I woke up early and cycled to the wide canal near where we live which people swim in during the summer months. It was about 6am, no one else was there, and I plunged in and lay on my back floating on the black water with the lily pads. I thought about all the small, magnificent wonders and moments of grace and joy which are available for us to seize all of the time - but which we often fail to grasp due to our knotted busyness, incessant internal chatter and ability to create dramas where none are needed.
It made me think that if I only had a short amount of time left I would spend my days honouring the tiny miracles of life - cold water: quenching our skin, wet earth: grounding our bodies, breath: breathing through us, love: holding us up. The challenge remains to keep doing this, even when we don’t know how many days we have left.