Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 5

steadying breath. I didn't have anyone else here with me. I needed to pay attention. I mentally threw a concrete wall up in front of my crumbling emotions and cut myself off from them. Dr. Tillman was still talking.
    "Wait. Stop. Dr. Tillman, can you start over? I spaced out for a few minutes after that first sentence." He looked at me with understanding in his eyes as he told me again about how the chances of success with chemo were now down to a mere 10% and surgery was my best bet (still only 30% success rate). Success rate. What a euphemism for survival rate. It would need to be soon, because the tumor was still growing, despite the chemo (it was 5% bigger than the last time we had taken its picture).
    He led me into his office, which was off the side of the consultation room and I sat down in a hard chair, facing his desk. He started talking again.
    "Mr. Tillman, I know that the last time we spoke you had no one you wanted to give medical power of attorney to, but with this surgery upcoming, I urge you pick someone. It can be very stressful not knowing your decisions will be made by someone you trust."
    I gave a start. I had not even thought about that. I had taken my mother off all my forms after the last time we spoke, but I hadn't had anyone else who I could put on instead. But now I did.
    "Yeah. I can put a friend of mine on them." I didn't want to call Andrew my boyfriend again yet. And I wasn't sure how Dr. Tillman felt about gay people. Just my luck he would be a homophobe and I would feel even worse about having him perform brain surgery on me.
    After I filled out an Advance Directive and a Medical Power of Attorney form with Andrew's name, I took my packet full of pre-surgery instructions and left his office. I needed to go somewhere to think. Somewhere without a million steps to get to the top.
    I flagged a taxi outside the hospital. It is probably one of the only places in Austin you can actually get a cab. I told the driver to take me to Mansfield Dam. I hadn't been there in almost a decade, but it was where I used to go to get away when I was college and trying to deal with coming out (to all but my family).
    There was this pull-off where I would go and sit and let the noise of the water crashing through the dam wash over my senses as I stared off into the rocks around the man-made lake. As the taxi drove over the dam and prepared to make the turn to where I remembered the pull-off to be, I was surprised to find a park ranger hut. Apparently, they had built a park here sometime in the last ten years. I sighed, paid my ten dollars to get in and asked the taxi driver to wait in the parking lot.
    Despite the rugged concrete and uneven rocky ground surrounding me, I took off my shoes to walk around the park and down to the water. As I took in the lake, I realized I had forgotten about the drought. There was no water running over the dam and the lake was drying up in places.
    Nevertheless, I walked over the dried up rocks and grass where water used to be, savoring the sharp pricks of pain the gravel and pebbles shot through the bottoms of my feet. I welcomed a pain that had a concrete cause, a pain that I could identify and cure if I wanted. The sharpness of it overpowered the general pains and weaknesses of the rest of my illness-ravaged body, and for a moment I could pretend I was well. I was well and had just walked over a sharp rock.
    Eventually even that got to be too much, so I put my shoes back on and walked the rest of the way to the water. As I sat and stared at the glassy surface in almost complete silence, I was struck by the dry spots encroaching on the water from the center and edges of the reservoir. The sand and rocks, like a cancer invading the still waters.
    Even now I am not sure what all I thought about, but I do know that I felt calmer when the taxi driver dropped me off back at my apartment. It was a crazily expensive cab fare but I couldn't bring myself to care. I could be dead in 3 days anyway. What did I have to lose?
    I sighed to myself. There was the gallows humor I was warned about during the one session with a counselor I went to when I was first diagnosed.
    "Where have you been?" Andrew asked, without accusation, when I walked in the door. He did look a little worried though. He had argued that he should take the day off from work to take to me to my appointment, but I had overruled him and told him I would take a cab. I wouldn't have been able to keep my walls up if I had