The Remarkable Pain

Well, today I am not sore anymore, my belly feels okay, but I am a bit woozy. Light headed. Could be the antibiotic. Could be that I haven't eaten enough in the last couple of days. Could be that my head is light. Meaning I don't have a fat head which I think is a good thing.

My friend Tone who stayed with me last weekend told me that I have to put more DeNiro stories into my blog to keep it interesting because how booooorrring is a blog about antibiotics?! So he reminded me of this one and yes, Tone was with me as a witness so you don't think I was just making all of this up.

My play, "Thighs" was playing off Broadway. Way off Broadway. Sheridan Square. And the marquee read, "Opening Tonight...Trish Soodik's Thighs" I always thought I should have taken a picture of that. Anyway, I was in New York and Tone, who was the stage manager, and I were walking down something like 42nd Street and a limo pulls up in front of us and out steps DeNiro, whom I had already spent many hours with, and he took one look at me and with just his eyes said, "Do not say a word. Pretend that you don't me. Just keep walking." And his girlfriend got out of the car and they walked away with him turning around just once to nod. True story. I am not making it up. Just ask Tone.

I was talking with a friend this morning and I described the feeling of the man formerly known as my husband leaving me as "one remarkable pain." She thought using the word remarkable was interesting. But I could not really think of another word that would best describe how I felt at that time. It was remarkable in that I had never felt a spiritual pain so deeply. A wound in my soul that, at the time, felt like it would actually kill me. And I thought I would never, ever be able to get rid of that pain. And then I got cancer in the same place I had my soul wound and you just have to wonder, don't you? Is there any correlation? How can there not be? And now both wounds are healing and with one wound I am left with a bit of vomiting and no sugar and with the other I am left with a bit of scar tissue that is slowly being covered up by the healthy tissue until I can almost not feel it anymore. It's funny how quickly one adapts. So I don't eat garlic. Chocolate. So I sleep alone. Cook meals for one. It is not so bad. I can rub my own feet. I can change a light bulb. I have the love of my son. Of my friends. I think it was that feeling of being safe, of finally finding a home that could swallow me whole and let me swim around and make mistakes and learn as I dog paddled in circles, trying to figure out this thing called love......................And when that home was split in two and the water spilled out onto the carpet with me as a beached dolphin not sure whether to try and get to the shore or try and swim out to sea by myself, I just lay there for a few months in that remarkable pain.

But I chose to swim again and though I'm sometimes not sure where I'm going and certainly unsure where the waves are taking me, I am trying to enjoy the journey and leave the remarkable pain behind to be swallowed up by seaweed and hopefully sunk with the heavy weight that it carries to the very bottom of the ocean...............