In the Body of the World Read Online Free

looks like inside without a uterus, cervix, ovaries. What will my vagina be connected to? I didn’t know the difference between my rectum and my anus. Do you? I didn’t know Iwas attached to my uterus. I never really thought about it.
    They don’t say: There will be this huge absence.
    Or that we may have to take some of your vagina.
    I am glad they didn’t say that. Between the bag and the liver, there was enough to think about, and the idea of dying from cancer in my vagina was just too fucking ironic and weird.
    I don’t tell them they’re removing what seems like a tumor but is really a flesh monument inside me. Huge and round. A taut ball of cellular yarn spun out of the stories of women, made of tears, silent screams, rocking torsos, and the particular loneliness of violence. A flesh creature birthed out of the secrets of brutality, each blood vessel a ribbon of story. My body has been sculpting this tumor for years, molding the pieces of pain, the clay residue of memories. It is a huge work and it has taken everything.
    I do know that the night before the surgery, my dear friends gather in my room, and Kim—who is obsessed with ritual and has memorized about a thousand poems, which spill out of her in any emotional situation or moment like iambic Tourette’s, insists that I state my intention with this whole journey and I think in my head, uh, surviving …
    But I say, I do not want to be afraid.
    I want to get rid of my fear, any fear, and then she flashes her deck of turquoise poem cards and says, “Pick one.” And I pick:
THE JOURNEY
Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations—
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
    I have been sober for almost thirty-three years and it is crazy how much I am looking forward to being drugged, I mean super drugged, out for the count, not dead but surely not here. Here is too much—the bag, something in my liver, a missing uterus, men wearing masks cutting into my body. The nodes. What the fuck is a node? Then there’s my son who I adopted because his first mother died. My friends who look very worried. Getting up at 4:00 a.m. to be put to sleep. An enemafirst thing. My mother who is not here. My mother who I haven’t told because I don’t want to worry her. The women of the Congo who don’t have the luxury of drugs or CAT scans or bags.
    Saving my own life.

SCAN

THIS IS WHERE YOU WILL CROSS THE UJI RIVER
    It’s dark in cancer town when we get up. Toast, Kim, and Paula walk me from the hotel to the hospital. We are all dazed from Valium. They are holding me by my arms, propping me up, and no one is saying a word. I feel like Gary Gilmore on his way to being executed at Utah State Prison. I believe he was killed by a firing squad, four shots to his heart. This could easily be my last morning, and there isn’t even any bloody sun. My final memory will be the last thing resembling beauty, the faux Pakistani carpets in the Marriott Hotel lobby. It’s dark in Tumor Town, but it’s prime time, busy. There are so many of us online at 4:30 a.m. that it feels like the airport. The crowd is midwestern and overweight, starving and empty from last night’s enemas and cleansers. The Mayo workers are way too cheerful for