The refuge that grew the tumor also found the surgeon

My parents fought the way weather fights, I wrote in the notes beside this one, and the boy I was went looking for indoors. I found it one flight up: my own head. Logic took me in. Logic had clean floors and predictable plumbing, and nobody in that room ever screamed. I moved in at twelve and, if I am honest, kept the residency for fifty years. Degrees in it. Careers in it. A platform that is, let us admit it, a temple to it.

Then the knock. Not on the front door. From inside the walls.

A meningioma grows from the meninges, the linings of the skull. Not an invader from outside; the masonry of the hiding place itself, thickening. Of course it grew there. Where else? I had lived in that room half a century; the neighborhood was fully developed. I fled to logic, and logic, it turns out, keeps a forwarding address.

And here is the part of the irony I did not see until Socrates made me say it: logic also got me out. When I needed a surgeon, I ran the barber test, you do not ask the barber if you need a haircut, you find out whose hands the people with skin in the game trust, and the test found me a man who would spend six and a half hours inside my skull without flinching, though he flinched at the internet having opinions about his hands. The refuge that grew the knock also found the door. The same faculty, betrayer and rescuer, in the same week.

Six and a half hours of craniotomy. I woke up, which is the entire plot twist that sentence needs. The scans are on this page because I kept them, and a man who keeps photographs of his own opened head always intended, someday, to tell you about it.

Then the fact I nearly slipped past my own questioner as a footnote, and he would not let it stay one: a week after they opened my skull, I left the home I had built. Two excisions, seven days apart. The tumor got six and a half hours; the older suffering got a moving truck. In the years before, the only prayer I had left had worn down to three words, please, please, please, and it was answered sideways, the way my prayers tend to be. In the Arena, my own assumption surfaced and I will let it stand in the record exactly as it fell: the tumor may well have been the symptom.

Which one was the cure? Or were they the same excision, done twice? I am not answering that yet. This house has learned to let the true questions stand until the answer is true rather than planned.

What I can do is what I did once before on this shelf, in the only register I own:

& one more prayer, then. You opened the room i hid in for fifty years, and You let me live through the opening. The walls of my refuge grew the knock; six and a half hours to unmake the hiding place and carry out the resident, and a week to carry him out of the other house too. i did not thank You then; the anesthesia spoke for one, the moving truck for the other. So i thank You now, late as all my verdicts: for the eviction i would never have signed, for the please please please You answered sideways, for the weather that followed me indoors until i finally came downstairs. Teach me to live in the house entire, You magnificent mf.

One more line surfaced after this note went to press, and it belongs on the record: I fled to logic, and she came for me anyway. She, this time, is not the tumor and not any her of my record. She is healing. She knew where I lived, and she walked in through the only door I had left unlocked: a question. How we heal is the next work. This note closes facing the weather.

Facing the weather

If you are holding a scan of your own tonight, yours or someone's you love, hear the one thing the attic's resident learned on the way down: do not weather it in your head alone. Tell one person before this day ends, and bring a second set of ears to every consult. And if the weather inside turns darker than scans, call or text a crisis line where you are; they pick up. The head is a fine room. It was never meant to be the whole house.

The mast held through six and a half hours with the keeper asleep. Yours can hold too, and you do not have to hold it alone.

Panels of this record: An ode to Grace · What the hell.