Perhaps, perhaps, we will all be saved.

Photo: A street in Ottawa. Taken by me.

Nine days ago, I celebrated my first year of completing cancer treatment. Celebrated might be a bit of an exaggeration; I spent the day working, and the evening sitting in front of the TV in my hotel room in Ottawa, Canada, having a warm fudgy chocolate cookie with tears dripping down my cheeks. I think I was crying for several reasons; that I had made it this far, that a year ago, I couldn’t have imagined that this was what my life would look like on the other side, for all the sorrow that I still carry in my bones that I think I may have to live with for the rest of my life. For all the pain, and for all the glory. Whatever glory means. 

K said to me in one of our sessions, in the gentlest voice, this sadness that you hold, you know it’s not going anywhere, right?

Today, on my second last day as I am sitting in my hotel room biting into a Bananarama BeaverTail, with tears dripping down my cheeks again, the truth of her statement hits home. Because there is a lot of sadness that comes with having gone through a disease that may or may not return, that has made an indelible mark. There is a lot of sadness that comes and goes mourning all the possible lives unlived, and reckoning with the fact that some possibilities may not exist for me in the future. There is the sadness with dealing with a new body, a body that was ravaged, that was cleansed and purged, a body that often reminds you that you need to take good care of it, and even when you do, that it can fail. There is sadness in the betrayal of it, in the utter pointlessness of disease, in the knowledge that in life, little makes sense. 

And yet, it is fitting that this hits me as I sit in a hotel room, the perfect metaphor for a liminal space. A kind of holding room, if you will, a place where bodies, hearts, minds are in transit. And feelings. We must not forget the feelings. Because feelings too, are utterly liminal. You can carry the sadness of a thousand years in your bones, and find something to laugh about. You can be grieving for all the ways in which your dreams have shifted, while being excited about what you’re going to do during your holiday in June. You can be reckoning with mortality and still getting pissed off at an email. All of this is me. I am the master of dancing in the shadows of the liminal space. 

I walk around in Ottawa, and in the corner of the shopfront on one of the streets, I see this man curled up, high as a kite, shivering the cold. Because it is April and it is freezing, still. Because as an entire human race, our consumption patterns are destroying the earth and impacting the climate. I digress. He is shivering in the cold, and he is curled under his thin, ratty blanket. I think about going towards him and giving him a packet of food, but before I can, a car drives up and parks by the kerbside. A lady jumps out of the car with a packet of food, pats him on the shoulder, pushes it into his hands, and then she gets back into her car and drives away. He’s still high as a kite, and he’s still shivering, and he’s still lying on the street, but now he has one meal sorted. I think there’s a story here about liminality (and about social safety nets) but as I try to grasp it, it flits away. 

Seeing him on the street, seeing many on the street, makes me give thanks - for having a hotel room to return to away from the cold, for having a home to fly back to in Singapore, for having the ability to be able to walk on the street and buy myself a meal and a bottle of water. I am so grateful that my lips constantly form the words of a prayer, and there is a little feeling that burgeons inside of me, it feels like love, it feels like grace, it feels like gratitude. Or maybe, it’s just my Asian body responding to the cold. I don’t know. 

I send fevered messages to P, and to S, and I write missives while they sleep at night, because I am 12 hours behind them, behind in time, can you imagine, we are all existing in the same time and space, and yet, in different locations, time is being interpreted differently. Imagine. So I am in the past, and they are in the future, and it makes me feel just a little lonely, as if just because of where my body is placed in this world, so far away from home, I am a little forgotten, a little left behind. I write long messages complaining about my exhaustion because boy, am I exhausted. The lack of sleep, the blood in my nose because my nasal cavities are so dry, indulging in sugar, the brown lipstick that I apply over and over again over my chapped lips to make myself look a little more presentable at the conference, my hair that is both long and short at once, the red glasses that dwarf my face. I write my life into the little text messages on WhatsApp as if I am desperate to record, to share, to keep up phantom conversations because when I stop, what if I’m forgotten? What if that’s it? 

One night, I meet my friend, M, for dinner. My last message to P is, the street feels dodgy, unsafe. I do not check my phone for hours during the dinner; before I know it, it’s almost midnight, and my jaw is hurting from laughing and chatting with M. I turn over my phone which has been in sleep mode, and I open WhatsApp and I see message after message from P, at least four missed calls, a missed call on FaceTime. I see a message from A, my best friend whom P had just met in Singapore, who was also trying to reach me. I message P and A immediately, tell them I’m okay, I’m safe, that I just lost track of time. When I get back to the hotel, P tells me how he was scared, how he didn’t think I would fall off the radar for those many hours without checking in, how he was planning to call X and speak to Y and find ways to track my whereabouts. I apologise profusely, I know what it is like to feel that vice-like grip on your heart when you cannot get in touch with someone, the way the mind begins to expand and explore possibilities, each stranger and crueler than the last. But inside my heart, a little sapling of joy bursts out of the soil, a little voice in my ear whispering, how can you ever think you will be forgotten when you are loved thus?

And perhaps that is what I am writing about today, about the human need to be loved, and the human capacity to love, and the ways in which we continue to stumble in the grey, trying to make meaning out of this madness. I think, and increasingly, I believe this more and more, that if we are able to love, if we are able to give this love in this way, pure and true of heart, and learn to receive love in this way, also pure and true of heart, then perhaps, perhaps, we will all be saved. In one way or the other. 

Even, especially, when you’re in a dark hotel room all by yourself in a strange country, far, far away from home.