So long from taotechu

Dear Readers:

Oh, how I have been stalling on this.

It is time to take taotechu off the shelf where it has been gathering dust, spider webs, and spider veins. But instead of wiping it off and setting it back in place, I am wrapping it in this rag of a note to you all and storing taotechu in the attic.

This is sad for me. I've wanted to keep taotechu going. It wrapped me in a soft, warm layer of comfort and cheer throughout the WTF of breast cancer. But when I made the shift away from cancer and posted a few letters, those trial balloons just seemed to float away. I watched them shrink in the sky. They weren't connected enough to you or to me. And it turns out that letters that are more connected, more personal, belong to the person I have written. They don't belong to a blog. I felt like I ran out of balloons. Or maybe they were that kind that are so hard to blow up your cheeks hurt.

The letters drifted off, but cancer is still on my mind. I think I am probably okay, that it will not return. But there are reminders, all the time. A dear friend, who went through an identical course of chemotherapy at the same time I did, has been stricken with a raging recurrence and is fighting for her life. I have half a dozen clients who have had cancer, and believe me, they continually have a creepy feeling that something is going to jump out and grab them, whether they are eating organic or not.

I can't keep writing about that creepy feeling, and I can't keep writing as if I don't have that creepy feeling. It has been a little eddy in which I am spinning, the way Eeyore did after falling into the stream when Tigger took him by surprise. Eeyore floated on his back for a long time, as I recall -- and not in the sweet way you do on a summer afternoon in a clean lake under a cloudless sky. He was morose about it.

I don't feel morose. But I recognize that I am in an eddy, and that it's time to climb out. Because the blog I so love has come to feel like pressure instead of release. Maybe that is a good thing; maybe there is less to release. I appreciate that, but I don't want to trade it in, homeostasis-like, for pressure.

The blog is an audience on the shore. They watch in beach chairs, the sun setting in their eyes. They are long, long bored with watching me float. Is she going to do anything else? they ask each other. Last year she dove in and then did a handstand underwater, says one person. They yawn politely, shade their eyes with a hand, try to make out my flat form on the surface of the water.

I still want to sculpt some of the blog into a little memoir, and I am bringing that down from the attic to see how it looks after a year of storage. But breast cancer memoirs are a ha'penny a dozen, and I am no longer optimistic that my little story of little breasts and a lotta luck and love can, well, float.

There you have it. Attics, cobwebs, balloons, Eeyore, a squinting audience, a book and a blog getting waterlogged. What a soggy mess.

Pass me a towel? I'm all wrinkly, and I want to watch the sunset with you.

Dear Readers, you will be relieved to know I have no adequate metaphor to express the gratitude I feel.

Love,
p

P.S. Will take taotechu down sometime before Thanksgiving. By that time, I'll be wrinkly and cold.