Information comes in small, unpleasant drops. And it is like watching a dripping faucet. You can feel the weight of the water sliding and gathering – and, well, there is a dark suspense in the waiting. The future is reflected in a tiny drop of liquid. And there’s a weird half-relief in the splash – even knowing it may be the start of a very big problem.

It is easy to get caught up in the moment as the moment before… something else.

You tighten everything down. Put all your physical effort into it. And you watch, all your energy funneled into anticipation. There is still another drip.

There is still a painful lump in the left breast.

I am not crazy. There’s something wrong. There’s been a breach somewhere -through the boundaries of the body’s best practice. Cells Gone Wild.

I hear the words first in my second language: det er påvist kreft.

Cancer sounds sharp to me. Like a serpent’s hiss, it cuts through everything. Whereas kreft is like a quick strangulation. Kreft ends in a plosive, not a growl.

It seems for a moment that all of nature is out to get me. Then I remember that I am not apart from nature. We are never truly apart from it.

I am not sure I have ever had a blank mind. But only as words begin following one another out of my mouth do I know what I am saying. I’m not thinking. I say odd things. Inappropriate things.

But a thought does surface, and I do think to ask if it is breast cancer, or another cancer that has found its way to my breast.

Breast cancer. There is comfort in that, actually. For now, it is something I can hold on to as a sign. The problem is, signs never tell the whole story. That fact is the inciting incident in every tragedy, isn’t it?

In stories, cause and effect is a satisfying illusion. It is the correlation of all the information folding in over itself like cards. We make an elegant bridge. I love the sound of cards slipping into place between the dealer’s hands.

Now I can think again, and I am thinking about when I went to the doctor because, five years after I’d stopped nursing my youngest, I still had milk. “Good thing you weren’t living 200 years ago, they’d have burned you at the stake for this. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

But I have always worried.

I worry about my fox hound Leonard and the lumps under his skin where his haunch was once smooth. He’s seven now.

He does this thing where he stares at me, intently, and then very carefully bites the tip of my nose. It’s like a kiss. Then he will curl up against me, his back along my side while I am reading. He is a comfort. That’s sort of his job. Worry and comfort go hand in hand. When we got him we asked the hunter if he would be cuddly. “No worries there.”

He probably didn’t actually say that. Since the hunter didn’t speak English, I take liberties with the memory.

Egil holds my hand while we wait for the doctor. Later, he holds my hand while we watch something stupid and familiar on television. My left hand is worry, wrapped in comfort. He laughs. Soft laughter that acknowledges everything wordlessly.

The whole is a lifetime of fragments, shifting like a kaleidoscope in the mind.