Rhena Writes

Tag: Memoir

  • Would a job by any other name smell just as sweet?

    Daily writing prompt
    What jobs have you had?
    View all responses

    What’s in a job? Does there need to be payment?

    Cash, ducats, affections exchanged.

    Does there need to be an exchange of tangible goods?

    Care, food, health, love.

    I was once a secret keeper. I was terrible at that job. I didn’t know which ones should be kept and which ones thrown away, whispered and carried away on the wind, which ones to bind up in my heart and which to shout out.

    Needless to say, I’m a terrible judge of character.

    I also spent a summer smearing cream cheese on bagels. This was before there were tip jars on counters.

    My first paid job was babysitting. I probably wasn’t very good at this either. Sometimes, I suspect that parents confused “good at babysitting” with “available and cheap, relatively.” Oh, and a girl in roughly the right age range.

    I even convinced myself that perhaps I really had a gift, a purpose. And so I ended up a teacher for a while.

    I’ve been an assistant editor, a research assistant, a sandwich maker, a camp counselor, a guide for a group of teenagers traveling, a creator. Those are things that I’ve more or less gotten paid for.

    Is getting paid a requisite for a job?

    Because the job I’ve had the longest is a mother but I don’t get paid for that. I’m told it is its own reward.

    I don’t get paid for this either.

    Still, one must carry on. Job or no job. Paid or not. And so I do.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Wait. What was the question again?

    Daily writing prompt
    Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
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    This question reminds me of the fortune telling game that I used to play as a kid called “M.A.S.H.” It involved listing four options for your future in different categories. They were usually things like: career, first initial of your husband (it was usually girls we were playing with and very heteronormative), number of kids, income, names of cities, etc… The letters of the game stood for: mansion, apartment, shack , and house. And then some sort of little ritual was performed in order to come up with a number. The number dictated which items got crossed off each list under there was one item in each category remaining. Thus, our futures would be revealed to us. “You will be living in an apartment, married to someone whose name starts with a J, working as a nurse, earning $30,000 a year in Boston.”

    In retrospect, it was pretty unimaginative and actually a little depressing. Try as we might to include unexpected variables (types of pets! different countries! color of home!) it was difficult to come up with ideas outside of our experiences, what we could see. But I don’t think that that’s terribly unusual for kids.

    So, now, as an adult, how do I view this question of where I will be in ten years? It makes me feel like I’m sitting in a job interview and being evaluated.

    I checked the question this morning before I left the house and decided that I would think about it while I was out and write the answer on my return home, which at the time would be in a couple of hours.

    Today was a beautiful day. We went to the local Thai Temple to celebrate Thai New Year with family and friends and enjoy the performances and food. It’s not quite the country-wide celebration/ water fight that it is in Thailand, but it’s still fun. My daughters and I ended up spending several hours just sitting on the picnic blanket. We’d originally thought we’d go for an hour or so, just enough time to get some mango sticky rice and maybe a few others dishes. But we were enjoying it so much that several hours slipped by. Oh, and it turns out that Tammy Duckworth was there. So that was pretty incredible just to be near her and to hear her speak.

    On the drive back, I thought for a moment, “What was the writing prompt of the day for the blog?” For the life of me, I couldn’t remember. And it turns out, I’m glad I hadn’t thought about it the whole time we were gone. If I’d been focused on thinking about what’s going to happen in ten years, I would have missed the beautiful moments right in front of me.

  • I don’t know about the animals, but I know what made me the worst pet owner.

    Daily writing prompt
    What animals make the best/worst pets?
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    My sophomore year of college, my three roommates and I went in together on getting a pet. It must have been around thirty or forty bucks each that we each contributed to the tank and the items we thought we needed to keep the chosen animal: a snake.

    I’m not sure what kind it was specifically, just that we named it Oscar and kept it in its tank on a table in the room which was meant to be a dining room.

    In retrospect, I was not well suited to roommate living. Perhaps it’s a by-product of having grown up in a large (my American standards) family of five children or perhaps it’s just who I am, but I later on found that I preferred living by myself. In fact, I enjoy being alone.

    Oscar also would have done better under different circumstances. So much better, that at some point, Oscar took off to be on his own. Was that Oscar 1 or Oscar 2? My memory betrays him. I’m getting ahead of myself.

    At some point, a snake named Oscar grew large enough that he managed to push open the lid of his tank and slither out.

    Where did he go? We had no idea. Even though he was strong enough to push open the lid, he was still quite a small snake. Although, who wants to find a snake, of any size, in their bed? Not me.

    Fortunately, it wasn’t my bed where I found him, some time later. It was under the garbage can when I picked it up to empty it. I screamed. There he was curled up. “Pick him up!” my roommate screamed back at me. Nope. Wasn’t going to be me. This was one of many signs that I was not cracked up to be a keeper of snakes. We learned enough at that point to put a rock on the lid of the cage.

    But now that I’m thinking about it, that must have been Oscar 2 because clearly he had gotten big enough to escape. Oscar 1 (only retroactively named such) didn’t make it to such a size.

    Oscar 1 (and Oscar 2) ate baby mice, called pinkies, which we kept in our freezer. They only at maybe once or twice a week, but part of the appeal (to some of the denizens of our house anyway) of having a snake was watching it unhinge its jaw and then swallow the little pink rodents whole. It was something from a nature program right in our very own living room.

    We kept a heated rock in his tank and it was on this rock where we’d let the frozen mice slowly defrost. The rock was also supposed to provide warmth for this cold blooded animal there in our rental house in frigid Wisconsin. Turns out: one heated surface is not enough for a snake. One day, one of us found in him in his tank, curling himself into an actual knot. We had no idea what to do. It seemed he was sick. Very, very sick. By morning, Oscar was done writhing. He was dead.

    The pet store employee seemed to think that he wasn’t warm enough to properly digest his pinkie, which meant that it rotted inside him.

    So maybe this question, to me, isn’t so much about what makes a good or bad pet, but what makes a good or a bad pet owner.

    I wasn’t a good roommate and this made me a bad snake keeper. I was a go along to get along person, unwilling to say “no” to other people. More importantly, unable to say, “yes” to myself. I would have been much happier living by myself, but I hadn’t yet given myself the self awareness to know that at the time. I was also too worried about being the “weirdo” who lived by herself. And maybe I was also too worried about being the uncool one who said “no” to chipping in to buy a house snake. And then a second. And for that, I’m sorry, Oscar 1.

  • What Olympic sports do you enjoy watching the most and why is it women’s gymnastics?

    Daily writing prompt
    What Olympic sports do you enjoy watching the most?
    View all responses

    Last summer, I took a much needed week-long holiday to the beach with my family. The trip was right at the end of an eight week stretch of two types of chemotherapy (administered every other week) and right before I was going to start three months of a second type of treatment (administered weekly). The only thing I really had energy for was a few hours on the beach in the morning. I’d then go to the couch for the hottest parts of the day. Fortunately, the couch had a TV in front of it. Fortunately, this was the week of the 2025 Summer Olympics in Paris. Fortunately, the TV could have four different stations playing simultaneously.

    In the thick of chemo/ cancer brain fog, I didn’t have the focus to be able to read much or paint or write or really do many of the things that bring me joy but involve some attention. I was pretty weak and my tastebuds were completely obliterated so that even eating together with my family was not the most enjoyable. The chemotherapy had also made my skin photosensitive so when I was at the beach, I was under the shade when I could be and usually completely covered up when I couldn’t. Oh, and I was also bald so I was sensitive not only to the sun but I felt chilly at the slightest wind or temperature drop.

    But watching the Olympics, indoors? That I could do. The narratives that emerge feel so fundamentally human that I could pick up on them and even enjoy them through my brain fog. When I mentioned women’s gymnastics in my title, I was really just doing that as an attempt at a cheap laugh. The truth is that this past summer, I enjoyed all the sports. I, too, was wondering, “who is this male gymnast in glasses who seems to be meditating but hasn’t competed yet?”. And was stunned when Steve came out to dominate the pommel horse in the last rotation. I was also smiling along with Snoop Dogg as he c-walked holding the Olympic torch. I also occasionally ended up watching hand ball and wondered, “What on earth is this?”

    At the time, I was too foggy to put it all together but now, I can see that part of me, I think, was really grateful to have a week of being constantly reminded over and over of what human beings are capable of and what, specifically, our bodies can do.

    I’m in the radiation portion of my treatment. It’s exhausting. But I’m walking and exercising everyday. I’m sticking to my routines which allows me to have moments of spontaneity and growth. And I can feel myself getting stronger each day. I’m not saying that I’m ever going to be an Olympic athlete. I’m middle aged. Even without cancer, I’m far past my physical prime. But it’s not Olympic gold that I’m working towards here. It’s being able to get back in the ocean, swimming and battling the surf with my kids. It’s being able to walk my son to school. It’s being able to enjoy a few sun salutations. It’s having the energy to be able to say yes when one of the kids wants to dance. Or even when I want to.

    In fact, you know, that one Australian breakdancer’s routine doesn’t seem all that out of reach…

  • How do you improve a community that was someone else’s dream?

    Daily writing prompt
    How would you improve your community?
    View all responses

    I live next a six lane highway.  I am deeply resentful of it. The county I live in is one of the wealthiest in the country. My neighbors are mostly working and middle class and immigrants. The highway is maintained by the state (of Maryland) but the sidewalks on either side are the responsibility of the county. Except for when it snows, when it’s the responsibility of the individual home owners. Except for the bus stops, which might fall under the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Or maybe the county. It’s unclear. 

    I’m an average homeowner and resident but I know more about those inner workings of the roads because living at the intersection of a county road and a state highway necessitates it. When we first moved in here, there was no sidewalk in front of our house in spite of the fact that it’s right next to a bus stop. I spend a lot of time emailing and on the phone with various people trying to get a sidewalk installed. Representatives of the county tried very hard to dissuade me. I kept sending pictures of elderly people walking in the road to get to the bus stop. One of my neighbors was a wheelchair user at the time and I told anyone who would listen about the time that he called for a ride share because the medical building he needed to go to was inaccessible to him in spite of the fact that he can see said facility from his front porch. 

    A man was killed when he was struck by a driver crossing the highway (at a crosswalk) about a mile up the road. The audit of the intersection resulted in removing a small section of fence that stood between the sidewalk and the crosswalk button. 

    A driver ran her car off the road and hit the fence around my property. My children were playing on the other side at the time. Needless to say, a sidewalk with an appropriate curb would have stopped her. 

    Eventually they installed the sidewalk. It was one of my greatest victories. A few more crosswalks were put in where neighbors and I had requested them, mostly near the parks and schools. But not much was done to actually slow drivers on the highway on our surrounding residential streets. 

    But I was still emailing and calling and tweeting (this was back in the days when I was still using that site), trying to get the speed limit lowered on the highway or at least some speed cameras and enforcement. On many nights, I could lie in my bed and all I would hear was cars (many with modified mufflers) drag racing up and down the highway outside my house. I’d call the non emergency police number many nights. Little changed. 

    The highway we live on connects outer ring suburbs to downtown Washington, DC where the streets are largely laid out on a grid, except for these wider roads, which shoot out from the center of the city likes spokes on a wheel. The highway I live next to is one of these spokes. The next spoke over would potentially be just as inviting to drag racers, but the residents along that spoke are wealthy enough that they have their own private security force replete with speed cameras. So the drag racers converge on spokes like ours where the residents rely on the county and state for safety and security. 

    A little girl died two blocks from my house in a car crash that was a result of this drag racing. 

    Some time after that, the speed limit was lowered. Some time after that, speed cameras were installed. 

    Too late. 

    Once upon a time, this place might have been the American dream of the suburbs. Single family homes, green lawns all the way from the front door to the street. No need for sidewalks when Dad can just hop into the car and drive into the city for work! Hey! The developers even left out the curbs so that homeowners can decide where exactly to place the driveway! No need to think about the messiness of women and children or oh, I don’t know, poor people? (You know the people who build and care and clean to maintain these beautiful homes and offices and the roads that connect them?)

    My six year old loves nothing more than to punt a ball as hard and as high as he can. (Ok, maybe he loves lego slightly more.) The problem is that the ball often ends up over the fence and in the street. We take him to the park a few blocks away from time to time. It’s just a big open field and a large parking lot. There’s no playground (in spite of promises made by the county that one would be coming). Sometimes there are a few neighborhood kids there  but mostly it seems that people use it as a spot to pull off from the highway. I see people eating or sleeping in there cars there. Sometimes people are working on their cars. Once after a recent snow, three pick up truck drivers used the parking lot to film themselves spinning doughnuts. That was nice (/s). 

    I’m always tense walking there. In spite of the crosswalk, I still worry about drivers coming off the highway too fast. We have strict rules about where the kids can and cannot bounce the ball to minimize them ending up in the middle of one of the more dangerous streets. 

    The other evening, as we approached, we could hear music. Soon, a man sitting at one of the benches playing a saxophone came into view. 

    My son turned to me. “How does he play so good?” he asked. I didn’t know. 

    The sky was moody above us. We could see dark clouds gathering next to the field. And the man kept playing. The wind was picking up a bit. And the kept playing. And my son booted the ball to himself and kept chasing after it. And I tried to pause to listen to the music but also my son kept asking me to play with him, to kick the ball or throw it to him. And so sometimes I did. And the man kept playing his saxophone. And the clouds kept clustering. And the wind kept doing its thing. And it was a maybe a jazzy tune but maybe all saxophone sounds like jazz to me. And my son kept playing. And the wind blew the man’s sheet music about and he got up to collect it and we started to leave. And he shouted something at us. And I couldn’t hear him and maybe he said “Rhena!” But he smiled. So I did too. And the traffic didn’t slow. No one came back to life. The drivers didn’t stop and exit their cars and pick up litter or even stop to listen. And he kept playing even as we walked away and even through the first drops of rain. 

  • Has anything changed?

    Daily writing prompt
    How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
    View all responses

    A few weeks ago, I had the bizarre experience of being in a very, very bougie place in DC. I’ve mentioned before here that I grew up in DC and many of my life experiences have been shaped by having observed power; by having spent a lot of time in close proximity to the very center of empire but not being a part of it. Being, rather, apart from it. In any case, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had fewer and fewer occasions to experience that world again. Which is all to say that it had been a while (and definitely since before the pandemic) that I had been in one of these “finer” corners of the DMV. It was very surreal. It was as if the pandemic never happened in that world. At least, it had that veneer. No one was in masks. There were no written signs about safety protocols. No containers of hand sanitizer out. Of course, if I had poked the surface, I’m sure I would have found changes and adaptations. Probably many of the staff lost loved ones or livelihoods or ways of life but they are probably also trained how to maintain appearances as if nothing changed. 

    I remember in the thick of the pandemic and lock-downs, watching movies or TV shows from before the pandemic and having to take a moment to remember, “Oh, yeah, we didn’t always wear masks everywhere, we didn’t always not shake hands.” I remember just watching old footage of crowded places made me feel a little uneasy. I read recently that even today, studios follow strict protocols to keep the actors from getting sick. So while they are presenting worlds and stories where the characters show no signs of there ever having been a pandemic, the key grips and food services and hair and makeup are still masked up. 

    Being in high-end DC had that feeling. I was being presented a world in which everything was care-free and easy. But behind the scenes, the people creating this world were not enjoying its ease. 

    It was head spinning when the next day, I went to take my girls to get their hair cut. I cut their hair (and my son’s and my husband’s and my parent’s) for the first year or so of the pandemic. It’s not easy work. So I was grateful when I was able to bring them back to the woman who’d been cutting their hair before the pandemic. She has her own salon attached to her house just outside the beltway in a largely immigrant community. It’s very small and worn down a bit, but we like it. During their haircuts, she was masked the whole time and when I checked in with her at the beginning, she mentioned how business hasn’t been good. It seemed to never have picked up to what it was like before the pandemic. 

    This is why I say that it feels like nothing has changed and everything has changed. Many have had no choice but to adapt in order to maintain an illusion so that others don’t have to adapt at all. 

  • Damn, WordPress, you really got me deep into self reflection today, don’t you?

    Daily writing prompt
    When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
    View all responses

    When I was five, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.

    My parents owned a restaurant in those days and I didn’t go to preschool. I spent a lot of time in the offices on the second floor of their business where my mom would be handling paperwork as the manager. Even once I was in Kindergarten, I usually spent parts of my summer days there.

    There wasn’t much for a kid to do at the restaurant but there was a stack of thick beige paper that my parents used to print menus and flyers on. And somehow, there usually were markers or crayons around. I went through an abstract phase: drawing long looping lines and then coloring in the shapes that emerged as the lines crossed each other. This phase could have been an entire summer or it might have lasted a few hours. Time and memory. You know how these things mix up, and especially in the mind of an abstract artist five year old.

    I do remember announcing that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. In spite of the fact that I spent so much time in my family’s place of business, I still had a five year old’s understanding of things like jobs and careers. What did I know of galleries and studios and monetization and starving? All of that was even more abstract than my looping lines.

    At times, I told my dad that I wanted to be a doctor. I planned on attending Harvard Medical School. Or so I said. I was mostly saying this type of thing to please the adults. And while “doctor” might have been closer to making grown-ups happy, “artist” was closer to making me happy. This is why what I really think I was getting at when I claimed that I wanted to be an artist is that I wanted to spend my life expressing myself and perhaps that I hoped that as an adult, there would always be space for that.

    Well, I’m not a doctor, so the need to please adults didn’t win out. But has my life otherwise turned out the way that five year old Rhena hoped? Although there have been long stretches where I haven’t, I now paint and draw semi-regularly. And as a five year old, I couldn’t write well enough to picture it as part of my future. But I’m writing now. And while it’s taken me a long time, I’m creating ever more space for self expression.

    In the meantime, my six year old son regularly announces that he IS an artist. There is no future dreaming about it. He is what he is in this moment. And I think I created space in his life for him to express himself now. So, yeah, five year old Rhena is very proud.

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    If you’d like to support this artist in living out her five-year-old dreams for herself, please visit my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! (Also, shares, likes, and poking around the other posts helps too!)

  • More of this: a practice.

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you wish you could do more every day?
    View all responses

    The sun, the wind, the tree outside my window are working in concert to create a moving shadow on my computer monitor base and desktop. It’s a performance, directed by Mother Nature. On the other side of the window, blades of grass shimmy and shake to the beat of the breeze. It beckons a memory from before language: light and dark, movement, rhythm. I wish I could show you more of this every day so that together, we might feel the same raw, timeless innocence.

    A few months ago, I started to take guitar lessons. I’m going to not equivocate or judge my abilities. This isn’t about that. I try to practice every day and I enjoy it, immensely. Every so often, I am able to enter that coveted flow state with guitar where I am able to focus on that one singular task, moment, note, chord, song, skill for a moment or two. Maybe even a few minutes. I enjoy the routine of the daily practice: stretch, meditate, scales, work on the assigned piece, and maybe learning a few new notes or a cord. I enjoy that each day I can see a little bit of my progress and a deepening understanding.

    I recently figured out that the tempo I play a given piece is only as fast as my slowest transition. The same way a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Rather than try to speed up the transitions that I most struggle with, I slow everything else down. This has allowed me to actually enjoy both the “easier” parts as well as the trickier ones. I can luxuriate in each note and cord, letting the easy, open notes ring a little longer. Inside those notes is where I find grace. This is where I learn that slow, fast. One is not better than the other. They just are.

    But I do not wish I could play more guitar everyday. In fact, each day, I set a timer and put down the guitar when it goes off. I do not obsessively try to “fix” whatever I’m working on. My goal is not to extend my practice to the length of the timer. My goal is to limit the time. And in doing so, I trust that there is always tomorrow’s practice. I trust my own faithfulness to the practice. I do wish that I could bring more of that trust throughout other parts of my day. Every day.

    I’m also finding time for exercise and movement each day. I do stretching and a few sun salutations when I wake up. (The moon was particularly beautiful from my kitchen window next to where I roll out my yoga mat this morning.) My dog and I enjoy a walk or two through the day. And this past month, I’ve started to integrate some Barre Empowered routines into my week. When I think about exercise, it’s something I kind of dread even though moving my body is something that I quite enjoy. And so I look for the moments of grace when I exercise too. Can I take it a little easier on myself today if I’m low on energy? Yes. Sure! I’m grateful for Maya, the founder of Barre Empowered, whose messaging is more supportive and, well, empowering than most exercise videos I’ve tried in the past.

    I don’t wish I could do more exercise everyday, but I do wish I could extend more gratitude to my body.

    I write, too, everyday. And I read, because otherwise my writing would just be a monologue rather than a conversation. Last year I read The Word: Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing (edited by Marita Golden). In his chapter, Nathan McCall said, “Yeah, I had a notebook. You could buy little things from the canteen, and I bought a notebook and started writing down what I was feeling. Prison ain’t exactly the best place to be telling somebody your deepest feelings, talking about your pain. So I was writing stuff down. And I realized that it made me feel better, whatever I said, whether it was a paragraph, whether it was a page. Sometimes I would just write and it would be disjointed and everything, but it would make me feel better, So the more it made me feel better, the more I did it. Then the more I did it, the better I became at it. Then I began to see it become a challenge to get my feelings down with the depth and preciseness that I felt.”

    My wish is that everyday I believe in the value of my words, my feelings, my stories and my writing that emerges.

    Please support my writing here.

  • I’ll take this as a sign to book my next tattoo.

    Daily writing prompt
    What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?
    View all responses

    I just got my second tattoo Tuesday this week. It’s on my right forearm, where I can see it when I’m writing. That one is the words, “it’s something to do” in my handwriting. I heard the poet Nikki Giovanni say this at the beginning of a talk. The full quote was something along the lines of, “I’m getting old. I don’t mind. It’s something to do.” I was nervous often this past year in the lead up to different procedures, surgeries, biopsies, treatments, etc… and her words often came to mind. They calmed me. She calmed me.

    The artist Bibi Abelle drew this one. She’s local and does single needle tattooing. Her work is beautiful. I’d read in an article that she also had cancer. It’s comforting to be in the presence of someone who you don’t have to explain things to, especially when that person is doing something as intimate as drawing on your body.

    The tattoo didn’t involve a whole lot of planning. I wrote the words on a piece of paper with the pen she had out for me to sign the consent form. I didn’t even pull out my favorite (if you know you know) pens that I had in my purse. I was a little nervous. No. I think actually it was excitement. I’m finally in a place where I’m able to differentiate between the two. And maybe my hand shook a little as I wrote. But part of my promise to myself was just to write it, tattoo it. One and done. Extend myself grace. Whatever came out of my hand on to that piece of paper was going to be tattooed on me. Bibi did give me some options of different sizes and we discussed it. She said, “bigger is always better when it comes to tattoos.” So I went with a slightly bigger size. It seemed apt also as my eyesight is getting worse and it would be easier for me to see it and read it. Part of this whole experience was to accept my imperfections and to let go of trying to make everything perfect. That was achieved.

    As my daughter pointed out when I showed her my new tattoo, “It’s also the answer to the question, ‘why did you get a tattoo?”

    My first tattoo was only about ten or so days before my second and also inspired by Nikki Giovanni, who had the words Thug Life tattooed on her left forearm. I’ve read that she was inspired by Tu-Pac’s tattoo across his abdomen. Mine is the words, “Kung Fu Life” in archaic Chinese. Here are the themes that I pulled from Nikki Giovanni’s tattoo: reclaiming words that contain entire codes, lives, meanings, philosophies, and ways of being but have been weaponized against us and people who look like us.

    It was designed by Candy Wang who’s based in the other Washington (I’m near DC) so I was looking for someone local to do the tattooing. I found Ariyana Suvar who is about thirty minutes from me in Clarksburg, MD. The truth is that in the back of my head, I was also looking for someone who could do a large chest tattoo where my breast used to be. I’m not getting reconstruction. A tattoo just seems a lot more fun? Beautiful? Unique? Meaningful? Collaborative? All of the above. Ariyana and I first video chatted. One of the first things she asked is, “Are you Thai?” I think my jaw dropped because she quickly said, “I saw your last name on your email.” She then explained that she uses Suvar for convenience but that her actual last name is also a longer Thai one. Relatable. Not only are we both negotiating using our long Thai last names in spaces that aren’t generally very open to that sort of thing, but it turns out that one set of her grandparents are also from China and immigrated to Thailand just like mine. In spite of how countries might try to contain and control their borders, migration isn’t that unusual in most parts of the world. But if you can see that something bigger was at work here to place me in her tattoo studio to get my archaic Chinese characters on my arm, then you get it.

    Do you know what it’s like to spend most of your life having to “explain” (ie justify) your family’s history in almost every space you enter? Do you know what it’s like to, on the other extreme, have that same history be ignored in almost every other space you enter?

    At that same appointment, Ariyana started designing my chest piece. Turns out, I’m going to have to put it off until after summer is over because (cancer) reasons. I do not have the words to explain what it means to have someone, an artist, look at your changed and scarred body and see potential.

    This morning, I was thinking about writing a blog post today. It was really bothering me, this question of: what am I going to write today? I’m trying (see “it’s something to do” tattoo experience above) to be in the moment with all things, but perhaps most especially with my writing. I’m trying to shut out all the voices that demand perfection and meaning and beauty and profundity in every word and sentence and paragraph, the voices that tell me that the only way to write is to brainstorm and outline and draft and revise and edit and on and on and on and anything less is not worthy of being seen by anyone else.

    I am working on trust. I am working on trusting that if I show up to my notebook or computer, something will come. The thing that’s needed will be come. It’s in the returning. It’s in the faithfulness. It’s in trusting that I have practiced this, this putting on words on the page over and over.

    And so it was, that I came to my computer. And there was the question of the day. The thing that had already been on my mind.

    And that, friends, is why I’m off to book my next tattoo with Bibi, one in which I’ll show up at her studio at the appointed time and we’ll just see what comes up, what we decide needs to be put on my body in that moment and that time. And that, friends, is Kung Fu Life.

    If you’d like to contribute to these and future tattoos, please click here.

  • Is a port just a port?

    I could feel something happening on my lower abdomen, close to my pelvis. I saw the blue paper a few inches from my face and lights and blurry shapes through the clearish plastic to my right. Nothing else. I heard the voices of the nurses and techs talking to each other and some music. I’m fine I told myself. This is just paper and plastic. I turned my head upward slightly to look at the opening to the paper and plastic just above where I was lying on the operating table. What if I push this whole thing off of me? I thought. Would I be able to? Can I even move my body? There is enough air, I reminded myself. Soon, I’ll have a sedative in my IV and this will all be fine, I thought. But what if I don’t make it that long? What if they’ve forgotten about me? Calming words started to escape from my brain, fleeing alongside logic. I heard a slightly louder voice from the other side of the room.

    “Are you just getting nervous over there?” Joy, the nurse, asked. Is she talking to me? How did she know? Words were still floating somewhere outside of my head and body, flitting about out there with its buddy logic, having abandoned feeling to be on her own inside my body.

    “Are you feeling nervous there?” Joy asked again. Oh! Maybe she is watching a screen. Maybe the screen tells her my heart rate and my respiration too. Maybe Joy is an empath. Maybe both and all of this is true.

    “I’m just feeling a little claustrophobic,” I croak from the operating table, trying to gauge how loud I needed to be in order to be heard through the paper and plastic sterile shield. Hands were quickly enlarging the opening, rolling the paper from above my head to eye level. My hot breath escaped and cooler air touched my face.

    “Something is on my body. I don’t know what it is,” I tried to explain the feeling of lying on a table and not knowing what’s being done to your body. But words were still on the lamb.

    A voice: “We use your body like it’s a table.” I shouldn’t be comforted by this, but somehow I was. It was the straightforwardness of it. This is your body. We are using it. For this purpose. And somehow it was comforting even though no one could see my face nor any of my skin even really (wrapped, as it is, in warmed blankets) save for the six or so square inches of my left chest, below my collar bone where the port has been situated ever since it was installed in a similar operating room at a different hospital eight or so months ago.

    One of the nurses leaned down so that he was eye level to me. “If you need something like that, you can tell us,” and he offered to take my glasses. I was grateful that he phrased his help and care in this way. He didn’t question why I didn’t say something, just offered.

    I thought that maybe I could hear the doctor who I met in the prep area an hour or so before enter the room. I could feel the IV in my left arm being fussed and fiddled with. It wasn’t painful and I knew that Joy was likely getting ready to push the sedative into my body and I could begin to anticipate the not caring. And then, perhaps, the greatest comfort, more so than having the drape pulled back so I could breathe, is when Joy said in her very serious voice, “nobody touches this patient until she is sedated.”

    Joy gets it.

    Another beat passed and I felt the cool liquid enter my vein. Soon, a bitter taste filled the back of my throat.

    “I can taste it,” I announced. Apparently, my words found and opening and returned back into my brain. So did logic.

    “That’s the sign of a good IV,” Joy assured me. “This next one is going to burn a little.” But already I didn’t care. Or maybe I almost wanted the burn, knowing that what would follow would be complete not caring. I barely even noticed when the doctor injected the numbing agent. Still, Joy assured me, “this is the worst part.”

    I thought I heard someone at some point say something like, “I’m sure the chemotherapy is the worst part.” And then clarified, “that’s some nasty stuff they give them.” Or something like that. But maybe I dreamt that part. In a way, I feel proud that I endured something that even a medical professional (and one who is currently cutting into my skin no less) acknowledges as awful.

    I could feel slight tugging at moments. And then someone held the port where I could see it. It was a purple triangular hunk of titanium bobbing a bit at the end of the thin, white plastic tube and covered in droplets of blood. My blood.

    “See?” Joy said. “It’s out.”

    “Can I take it to show my kids?” I asked her, still sedated.

    “No, my dear,” she responded. “This is biohazard.”

    “Yeah. I’ll just draw it for them,” I answer.

    “Just draw a line with a triangle at the end.”

    I thought I could hear bits of conversation. The surgeon and the nurse discussed the scar from when the port was installed. “If she scars, she scars,” the doctor said. I could feel the stitches going in. The right side of my chest, where my breast was removed a few months back, is entirely numb. No nerves there anymore. And I’m finally used to the odd way it feels to touch the skin and have no sensation.

    And like that, the surgeon was done and gone. Ten minutes they told me. Someone finished bandaging me up and then they took the “after” x-ray showing nothing to pair with the “before” x ray of the triangular port in place.

    When the port was first placed, it was uncomfortable and at times even painful. Still, it was better than the alternative of the chemo medicines burning the veins in my arms as they entered my body through an IV. And the discomfort didn’t last forever. At times, I even forgot I had a port, although I never really wanted to touch it, so disconcerting was the feeling of that bump of metal under my skin. I say that at times I would forget it was there, but those moments were brief. I wondered how much my body and mind had adapted to having this in me without me even realizing. After my chemotherapy treatments were complete, I still had to have the port flushed at least every six weeks. Tracking this, scheduling the flushes, getting to the office, all of that took a large amount of mental space. I wondered too, if my body was expending energy to accommodate my port in ways that I wasn’t aware. Would I feel different after having it out?

    It’s been two days now and I don’t know how different I feel. Is my energy flowing more smoothly on that side of my body? Maybe. I’ll give it some time. I’m still healing.

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