Michelle Valois lives in western Massachusetts with her partner and their three children. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Pank, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Baltimore Review, The Prose-Poem Project, Anderbo, The Literary Bohemian, and others. She teaches writing and humanities at a community college and blogs here.---------
The Arbitration of Disease
They let me keep a pink, plastic binder of handouts and handbooks, business cards and receipts, scripts and test results, brochures and the assorted ephemera of an unpleasant diagnosis.
They took my taste buds.
They let me keep all of my teeth, my lips, my jawbone, my chin.
They took unwanted facial hair and the misguided notion that only other people get sick.
They let me keep most of the hair on my head.
They took my monthly bleeding, once as regular as the cycles of the moon or a clock that never needs to be wound.
They took deep French kisses – or maybe we lost those before treatment began.
They let me keep the virus.
They took my youth and the certainty that I still had time to make mistakes. They took my whole concept of time. They took time itself.
They let me keep the sensation of an empty stomach.
They took my appetite for food – but not for you; they let me keep that tangled and troublesome lust.
They took my immortality, which, admittedly, never was, but gave me a second belly button, the only thing left of the tube that nourished me for five months.
They took thousands in co-pays.
They let me keep my friends, those sisters of mercy who seldom said I can’t and always found ways to help.
They took my voice, hid it somewhere behind swollen vocal chords and a mouth of wounds.
They let me keep the feeling of being misunderstood.
They took most of my saliva but made sure I had water bottles that seldom go unfilled.
They took the language of longevity but left me with an unexplainable aversion to the word survivor.
They took pounds of flesh and the familiarity of my own face in the mirror but imprinted me with a thin web of lines that frame my mouth, lines I cannot bring myself to call wrinkles.
They took and they took and they told me the scars would be internal, as if that made the wounds less profound. And then, finally, they took back the johnnies – white johnnies and blue johnnies, checked and striped johnnies, johnnies I could never fasten in the back, and then, maybe out of pity or maybe out of guilt, let me keep a beautiful periwinkle skirt with rose and yellow flowers and a ruffled trim that I bought the summer before my diagnosis at my favorite consignment store, that I bought a size too small, in the hope I might soon lose weight.