THE DUNES

Furry topped spear grass, folds and sways in the wind. The sun sears my invalid white, skin but I am not ready to leave here yet. Flies hover about my mouth and eyes. The sand, beyond my sheltered dune fills the wind, scouring the air, the beach, skin. Even here at the edge of the world where white capped dark water, turns sickly green and white walls of ocean, crash thundering onto the deserted stretch of sand, I cannot relax. A strange tension fills me and peace is as elusive as prolonged thought. The broiling waves, seem to feed the turmoil within me, who’s cause I neither know, nor can remedy.
I am alive. I have beaten the cancer that invaded my body but has left me with a feeling of ‘otherness’ of having no place in this ‘now’ as though perhaps I was meant to die and do not fit this life any more. Or perhaps it is my own feeling of guilt that I have cheated somehow and have no right to be here- strange as that may sound. My eyes are drawn constantly to the horizon, the point where indigo meets sky, a seamless line perfect in its order- seeking what I do not know but seeking- expecting perhaps some sort of revelation an answer to my unknown question. Again the urge to move fills me. Never do I feel that I can just sit, just be, as though some nameless harrier drives me from any peace that may be had. I have no need to move, nothing requires my urgent presence but soon I will give in and move on but not yet.
Tentatively, I expose my ruined body to the air, lifting my t-shirt so that the warm air blows over my scars. It’s whispering touch, the heat of the sun sending warmth back into bones broken, healed but left hollow and cold inside. I show my deformity to the sky, to the ocean, to the world. In my mind a child’s voice screeches ‘look at what they’ve done to me’ but my mouth stays closed. No one else knows the horror that I have become. Clothing hides the mutilating tracks of scars that crisscross my body from belly up across ribcage, to behind my shoulder. They look like an image from an old instruction manual I once read on how to effectively cut your opponent in half with a sword. Those who care see only what they want to see that I am alive and getting stronger.
The scream that has been building within me for months erupts from my throat without warning, as though it has been waiting for a moment of solitude for this place of windswept seclusion to release its rage. The wind tears the sound from my lips- renders it silent as if never uttered- an irrelevant moment, lost within greater sounds of the world. I begin to sob at the futility of it all but the movement fans the embers of pain in my ruined left side into a raging bonfire and I realize that I should go, should not be here alone so far from aid.
I reach down to the sand for the book I have been reading “Malouf”s’ ‘An imaginary life” and am struck by the figure on the front cover. It is the hazy image of a person, ill defined, shrouded as though there but not real. This is the image of my new life, the title, the title of my new existence.
I grasp the book but my left hand cramps and throws it down to the sand again as the muscle suddenly releases. Tears come again and I wipe them, their salt now indistinguishable from the oceans spray and gently remind myself that what I have is still a life. Perhaps not the life I had once but the one I chose. The one that will give me time to watch my children grow, one as an adult, the other into adulthood and I find that after all it is a small price to pay.