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Map of My World

Illness is a foreign country I never wanted to visit, and a language I never wished to speak.

By Kathryn CarsonPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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It’s the nausea that grips me. The blood on the floor when I’m not supposed to be bleeding. The glistening pomegranate seed that’s supposed to be “tissue” and instead is recognizably an arm, the fingers not yet more than a paddle. I wasn’t even trying to get pregnant, but I am undone by the loss. There’s a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that means a yearning for a place to which you cannot return, or perhaps never was.

It’s the thing that looks like a magnesium flare in my vision, arcing across the eye I don’t yet know is a battlefield. The words that echo in my head long after they’re said: “You might want to put your affairs in order.” The surgeries. The pills. The numbers that come to dominate my life: eight on the pain scale at 3am, the 76% chance of metastasis, the six feet away that my parents have to keep my baby because of the radiation. There’s a phrase in Japanese, mono no aware, an appreciation of beauty and the sadness of its passing.

It’s the three-in-the-morning sweats. The dizziness that strikes when I’m driving. That first moment I feel the pinch of a UTI. The numbness that spreads across my body. The buzzing sensations in my face, the squeezing around my arms and ribs, the twitching in my legs, the terrible bone-aching cold that turns my limbs to the color of corpses and makes it impossible to sleep. In Latin, “multiple sclerosis” means “many scars.”

There’s a phrase in Chinese, "the flower seen in the mirror, the moon reflected on the water's surface.” It means the vanity of searching for truth in the illusions we cannot touch. I am not Welsh, nor Japanese, nor ancient Roman, nor Chinese. I reach outside myself for words my culture has not given me, to understand facts my life has. It may be appropriation. It is certainly vanity.

In American English the closest I’ve come is a bumper sticker from my college days: “My karma ran over my dogma.” At a very different 3am, on my way home from a party, I stopped at a red light. A woman pulled up next to me and gestured to me to roll my window down. Warily, I did so, and she called out to me, “What’s your bumper sticker mean?” The light turned green and, at a loss, I said, “It’s just funny” and hit the gas. But that was the “me” who had had no miscarriage, no cancer, no MS—the “me” who had yet to see the moon because the barn burnt down. Now, at the end of my fourth decade I would say to her, “My life has given me more than my culture can handle.” There might be a word for that lack in some other language, but I haven’t found it yet.

In Japanese, yoko meshi describes the stress of speaking a foreign language. It translates as “meal eaten sideways.” I’ve spent years choking down words and facts I never wanted to. Illness is a foreign country I never wanted to visit, and a language I never wished to speak.

sad poetry
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About the Creator

Kathryn Carson

I have MS, Hashimoto's, and a black belt in taekwondo. I'm also an ocular melanoma survivor. This explains why my writing might be kind of obsessed with apocalypse--societal, religious, and personal.

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