Journeys Within and Beyond

There are masks in the pockets of coats I have not worn in months, flattened into the side compartments of handbags, crumpled at the bottom of my backpack. I have the serious ones, the N95s, with their stiff white cups and elastic bands, and the softer disposable kind, blue and flimsy, that I pick up at the hospital. Sometimes one hangs from my wrist or sits below my chin, ready to pull up, if I’m going to a show, museum or anywhere crowded. Insurance against other people’s breath.

Trying to save my own life turns out to be mostly paperwork. The longer it goes on, the more boring it gets. I want to do something else. Anything else. Even death sometimes seems more interesting than administering not dying. Journeys Within and Beyond is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Scheduling scans. Rescheduling them when the authorization doesn’t come through.

On a Tuesday, I thought I might be dying. That was 10 days ago. I was reading when a pain opened in my upper abdomen and chest. Ten out of ten. The stupid scale they hand you in hospitals, where ten means the worst pain you can imagine. I’ve had a collapsed lung. This was worse. It felt as if a piece of broken glass had lodged behind my breastbone and someone was working it back and forth. Then the pain climbed until both ears ached, deep from the inside. the way an infection aches.

Three weeks ago I ended an essay on losing friends to cholangiocarcinoma with my phone face-up on the desk. I was waiting for news about a friend in the hospital. I wrote that I had been wrong about death before. I was asking it to make me wrong again. It didn’t. Sydney died on Wednesday. Journeys Within and Beyond is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last week, my writing group prompted us to write about ten things we had lost. This is one of mine. Journeys Within and Beyond is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. My professional life was conducted almost entirely in the future tense. At the UN, nearly every document was about what someone would or should do next. The Security Council decides that member states shall. The mission will deploy. The parties are urgedto.

Every reflexologist finds it. I never tell them the diagnosis. Every time, somewhere in the middle of my right foot, the thumb stops. Presses again. “You have some congestion here”, one says. “I’m getting a strong response here,” says another, pressing the point again before looking up at me. On the map of the sole, the liver is a broad territory beneath the ball of the right foot, extending into the arch. Mine announces itself to strangers.

2026 is only half over, and already it is defined by the friends I have lost to Cholangiocarcinoma. Cancer friendships are not like other friendships. There is no need for small talk. You already know too much. You know the wait for scan results. You know the word stable, the word progression, what each one does to the body. You know the waiting room, the book open in your lap, no idea what the page says.

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is running out of room. Six years, by their estimate. The announcement came before Cemetery Shorts, Rooftop Films' annual short-film screening held among the graves. I was back there on a warm June evening, a year after the same event featured Embodied, an animated documentary by Sam Smith that included my description of my deathbed. Last year, I left thinking about time. This year, I left thinking about where bodies belong.

What Surviving Longer Doesn’t Prepare You For Laughing sets it off. Not a polite laugh, a real one. The huge, involuntary kind that erupts from somewhere low and takes the whole body with it. That’s when the coughing fit arrives. I can’t fully inhale without triggering one. Two laps in the pool and I need to stop and catch my breath. When the diagnosis came—radiation pneumonitis—it was a relief to finally have a name for what was happening.

At every security checkpoint in Kabul, there are two entrances: one for men, one for everyone else. Parallel spaces. Separate waiting areas, separate search rooms hidden behind walls or curtains. Most public space in Afghanistan is now, by design, overwhelmingly male. Streets. Markets. Parks. Hotel lobbies. Restaurants. The visible world belongs almost entirely to men. But inside the small, hidden spaces, the waiting areas and back offices, the atmosphere changed completely.