Tropic of Cancer

 

As fate would have it, I am currently living the somewhat harsh realism of a cancer patient’s loved one.

It has been a very long time since I even considered writing anything here. Since the last time, I have issued eight booklets of erotic short stories, one of which was actually based on a short story I wrote on this site, and a poetry book, all of them in print form only. It felt like the next natural step for me, something I really wanted to do, to be part of the writing community at last, with something tangible.

I participated in an art exhibit with the erotica series and wrote a new piece for the event.

Anyone can tell you, except huge writers who make a de facto realistic living from their books perhaps, that the come down is steep and plummeting after the show is over.

The books aren’t selling too well. The exhibit succeeded in raising interest in my body and image, not in what I was actually trying to do. Which I guess is fair. I have used my image and my body and my likeness to promote the work, a lot. And it’s a nice body, so it follows quite naturally, in those circles, that offers to shoot photos is more probable than any bewildered exclamations in the vein of Ooh you’re such a genius we need to get you a book deal stat! It also so happened that I was introduced at the opening night in the main artist’s ruminating speech as a movie theatre worker, who nonetheless was an immensely talented writer, an offence I thought I’d never forget.

 

It’s one thing to advance in years. You lose the unnecessary inhibitions concerning the body and how it is being seen or portrayed. And what I’m loving to see is that the new generation of artists, the twentysomethings of 2022, never had those inane needless insecurities in the first place. They love their bodies from the get-go. They post all sorts of pictures of themselves so freely, they pose for Instagram stories with ferocious abandon that I have had to carefully learn, after painstakingly unlearning first hating my body and being ashamed of my figure.

I mean wtf? I wasted a lot, and I mean a lot, of time, hiding what I considered to be my weak spots, camouflaging, enhancing, practicing the kind of candid hair toss that would never seem practiced but natural, buying clothes that hid my beautiful ass, and I say this with utmost sincerity; it’s my one beauty. It’s because of the years and years of keeping the demon at bay with lengthy walks around wherever I was living at the time. I still do it, whenever I can. I’ll walk till I die, I think.

Only here’s the thing.

When the oncologist showed me the picture of the malignant growth in the back of Markus’ neck, next to his spine, a picture I’ll truly never ever forget, I, in the background somewhere, the small part of me who wasn’t crying uncontrollably in the goddamn examining room, felt a deep shame.

Our bodies, ourselves, that’s for sure.

If body fails, if it crumbles, it’s over.

                   

I’m writing this in the middle of his radiation treatment. This is the easy part. The treatment itself is very quick, in and out in fifteen minutes. His daily dose of cortisone is strong, and for periods of time it is almost deceptively easy to imagine for a minute that he is all better now. He’s strong. He argues with me, always a measuring stick of sorts of our energies as a couple. He is working. His accumulated knowledge on warfare and foreign politics gives him an edge writing about the horrors of what is going on in the world at the time of our private horror.

I, on the other hand, can’t handle more that headlines on the Russian attacks in Ukraine, the Chinese plane crashing in the mountains, or the Don’t Say Gay bill passing in Florida, right now. What I do is read the in-depth, humorless, pompously condescending, straightlaced and missing-the-point analysis on Basic Instinct in New York Times and then proceed to take malicious pleasure in shredding it to bits in a long Whatsapp message to my friend, I’ll call her Vitae, since she is the best part of me and is literally breathing life into me. We have lunch at our small hamlet’s best if perhaps also only restaurant and bar, the sun is warming the rapids and melting the massive queen-size mountains of snow, she is supposed to be working and I’m supposed to be back home doing laundry and checking on my man and getting the fire going and getting wood from the shed and fucking praying sometimes in the night I pray now, to whom or what, I don’t know really, but I feel like doing it, and also that it’s less relevant, the who or what for, than the act of doing it.

But we are playing hooky. It’s beautiful outside, Vitae is gorgeous and I’m feeling powerful and light for a change, it’s warm and summer is coming, and I just had my hair cut and I’m wearing Markus’ biker jacket as a good luck charm yep I’m very into charms and chanting now sometimes I chant in the night now, mouth silently words like Look here I am taking the evil and tossing it into the sky I am gathering it like wool and throwing it into space and you will yield to my will because I always get my way, you know this right, so do us both a favor, I am taking this pain and throwing it into the sky and who is this mystical being I am challenging and pleading? Oh who the fuck knows. It is one of those nighttime beings I like to chat up with. But I know she is powerful and has the power to do this, too. Picturing her she has my face, like in Killing Eve Villanelle imagines Christ looking exactly like herself, only in drag and with a beard.

Vitae tells me about her morning, I about mine, and how when I last masturbated, I came so hard I actually ejaculated and had to break out the cleaning supplies to rid the bed from the exhibits of my solitary pleasure. I do that a lot both during the day, and into the night, now.

When Markus had his computer tomography, I watched Gaspar Noe's Love while I waited for him to return.

I don’t know what it is about. I don’t question it. It’s connecting with my body, I guess. It’s being kind to myself. It’s a short escape from everything else. And the orgasms are astounding. It’s as if my body is being freed from all the gunk that has been gathering for years.

Female ejaculation was never something I was particularly aspiring towards, or even gave much thought to, and to be honest, part of me thought it’s all bullshit really.

It’s not.

So why is it happening now, in the deepest abyss of my adult life, when all the realities and all I held to be true in my day-to-day life has been turned upside down in one fell swoop, when I cry every day, when most of my time is used thinking of what needs doing and is he okay and what was that coughing fit and blood sugar rising to a dangerous level and how am I supposed to go to work in the middle of stuff like this? Is it some counter-intuitive way of my body telling me to enjoy it now, to enjoy it fully, and get to know it, for one day it will be gone?

When I allow myself these moments of luxury solitude, my mind empties of all daily woes and I think of nothing or nobody in my day-to-day circle of things. I have maybe two or three images in my head that play over and over, and mostly, when the body takes over, I, finally, for a little while, blissfully, think of nothing at all. During the long minutes in the throes of les petites morts, the only way to accurately describe experiencing valley orgasming - yep, those, too, and also during this time like what is going on? – I both long for it to stop because it feels like I might actually die, and long for it to never stop because the pleasure is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

During the most awful and terrifying hardships, the best sex of my entire life.

We respond in unique ways to what life throws at us, I guess. It’s like the universe or the gods or whatever were feeling charitable, after the ugly and unfair curveball of cancer and words like metastasize being thrown around at the hospital and me feeling like killing everyone of those motherfuckers with an axe in the bloodiest, most gut-spilling Tarantino fashion I can muster just for the hell of it, and hit me with the wildest, most satisfying and ecstatic liberation of my body and all its facilities and everything she can muster, with complete abandon.

This is something we are joking about a lot now. On the day of hearing the news, Markus lost his favorite jackknife, yep he collects jackknives, and couldn’t find it for several days. It quickly became the symbol of our bad news (I realize they are really his bad news, but just give me this ok?), it was like as if having cancer wasn’t enough here, why did the knife need to skedaddle, too?

A week and a half later, he suddenly found it in the breast pocket of one of his coats. He became insanely happy over this little find, and so we decided the gods had decided to throw him a bone and allow him to uncover his beloved tchotchke.

 

Here’s another thing. Markus may be many things, but he’s also the man who asked me why the fuck wasn’t I publishing my writings anywhere. No one else asked me that before. He was the first person to tell me to my face that not only was I as good as anyone else, but better.

I have no idea whether this blog, or by extension, the erotica series, or the poetry book, would be in existence without what he said, but I doubt it.

So I owe you confidence and courage and all kinds of shit.

 

Written in the sonic space of Animal, by Lump

 

I don’t know if this piece is read by anyone but you, my dear. If yes, hello, friends, acquaintances, and haters, too, should there be any. Apologies for the rather unimaginative title, but some of you know that I have a continuous love affair with the early ambassador of female erotica, Anaïs Nin, and hence cannot bring myself to hate her long-time lover, Mr. Miller, no matter how out-of-date or cock-suckingly awkward his autofictional semi-porn may to us, living in the Twenty-First Century, feel.