Time is a Funny Thing

Five days ago, we were told that Ty's colon cancer returned, this time it showed its ugliness in the form of a smallish tumor in his liver. This is the exact moment when time took on a form we no longer recognized.

Time warped into fragments that stood still and sped up, all at once.

I remember walking out to our car from the cancer center, my body feeling like it was not attached to my mind and each step I took required effort because my thoughts were stuck back before the news but my body somehow knew it had to get the heck out of that building before it crumpled into a shaking mess on the floor. We passed many people on our way out, most of whom looked to be in their 70's and 80's, and my mind was still defiantly screaming "We don't belong here! Look at him, he's still got so much pep in his step and the dreams of his youthfulness still shine so brightly! You have nothing in common with these patients, GET OUT OF HERE NOW!!!"

Like I said, time suddenly warped around me and my ADHD brain was in a race to make some sense of this new life-altering information it was bombarded with and it was NOT handling it well. It was, in fact, shutting down, and my body didn't know whether it should curl up in a tight ball on the ground or run for its life in hopes of outrunning whatever threat made the mind go into a whirlwind.

Ty and I drove absentmindedly to Harry's Cafe, the local restaurant that is iconic to our town and for some reason felt like a safe place to run away for a minute as we gathered ourselves. Maybe it's the fact that Harry's is tucked away in an unsuspecting place (a strip mall) but once inside it feels like you've walked through a portal into the past, where the martinis taste better and the walls themselves are a reminder of all the grit and grace the generations before us had.

So there we sat in our booth, staring at each other with a mix of heartbreak and hope in our eyes, trying to calm our minds enough so our feet could feel like they were back on solid ground again.

The server came and she may as well been from another planet as she calmly took our order as though life kept moving on at the same pace as always. To me, I wasn't sure if 5 minutes or 5 hours had passed since we'd left the cancer center so it sort of felt like an out of body experience watching myself read the menu and use words. My voice did not sound like mine and I remember having to actually try really hard to bring the glass of water to my mouth. My brain was not yet in sync with my body and it was the strangest feeling. I suddenly became hyper aware of my surroundings and the people around us at other tables looked like they were living in an entirely different dimension than we were.

The booth where Ty and I sat was in slow motion while everyone else kept going on as if the world did not just shift off kilter in a stomach lurching jolt.

Ours did, and we were still in the midst of the aftershocks.