Pushed myself to take a 10 minute walk with Leonard last night, but that was a mistake. I crawled into bed with a migraine.

But I woke this morning without one – for the first time in six days. I’m taking the morning slowly. I don’t even dare move this head through an asana sequence. Coffee and water. And prophylactic paracetamol. I have a long day of writing ahead. It will be good to focus on something besides my senses: an imaginary world where the smell of chemicals, body odors, and dog breath really don’t come into play.

The “cancer hour” I promised myself has bled into the long days of this past week. I distracted myself with sitcoms and slept through half of every episode. The exercise and activity chart I made for myself before I started chemotherapy is still hanging on the refrigerator. I really should take it down. At this point, it’s just mocking me.

I hear the birds outside. And the train passing by every now and then. Leonard is sprawled on the floor, taking up more than a square meter of this little room. He’s got his head on a stack of books. I hope he’s not drooling. Here I sit. In my tiny room with the French doors, because I still believe elegance is more about attitude than scale, more about framing the parts than interrogating the whole.

Life goes on so much the same as before, in so many ways, that I am still jarred when I see my reflection in the mirror. There’s a wig on a plastic stand in the guest bathroom. This morning what it made me think about was that someday there may be other jarring elements in this room. Handrails around the toilet so we can get up and down safely, maybe. If we are lucky in being unlucky. I mean, I would love to think that “that won’t happen to us” and that our healthspans will equate with our lifespans. But the unexpected happens. Despite daily runs. Despite “clean” eating. Despite good sleep hygiene. Maybe it is okay to make room in our imagination for the possibility – though without resignation.

I left a facebook group that was supposed to be about weight training after 50, but felt all-too-much like an anti-aging group. Women in their 70s fretting about creping skin. It makes me wonder if anyone is truly happy with the way that they show up in the world. And it seems clear to me that I am looking in the wrong places to find those people. And it is definitely clear to me that I am still far too impressionable, even now.

I’m tearing up a little, sad that Egil and I aren’t hiking the plateau this month as we’d planned. I “needed” it. It isn’t about the absence of people. People are friendly along the trails. It has something to do with the absence of a social rubrik to measure every moment against. What is beautiful? What has meaning? Nature is like reboot for my values. A chance to learn.

When we crossed the plateau on our honeymoon (seven years ago this week), there was one point we circled around a melting lake, and saw a patch of ice that was covered with blood. We imagined all kinds of scenarios, and were joking about it when the host at a day cabin, setting out snacks for us, suggested that an elk had probably birthed her calve there.

Last summer, B. took Egil and I on a long day-hike to Pear Lake in the Rocky Mountains. She was already losing her sight then, but you would never have guessed it. And our conversation ranged from the frivolousness of how often Egil makes me change my wool socks out on a hike, to the dead-seriousness of her glioblastoma. She told us that one of her doctors recommended she join a group of women with breast cancer to deal with the emotional issues she was facing. Right. She laughed about the absurdity of the suggestion. We all did.

Thinking back, I realise none of us thought about metastatic breast cancer. We thought – pink ribbons, survivor tattoos, and 5Ks.

B., was marathon runner, a woman who repelled the flatirons in her late 40s! She was terminal – her sight being overtaken by flashing rainbows: “Not the fun kind,” (as she’d described them that morning only hours before she was diagnosed six months earlier). A breast cancer group didn’t seem like a good fit.

We live in little bubbles of knowledge. It’s a fact, not a flaw. We learn.

I remember watching her in awe: moving so easily down the steep trail, scanning the terrain with her tunnel vision by moving her head side to side – almost imperceptibly. We learn. We adapt.

The last time I spoke with B., was when I told her I had breast cancer. I’d spoken an hour with her just a few minutes earlier and not said anything. It felt wrong to mention my little tumor with the good prognosis. It also felt patronizing and disloyal to hide things from her. After we hung up, I texted her husband and asked his advice. It was clear to him that she’d want to be able to be the friend she has been for me these past 20 years. He had her call me back before I was even able to dial her number.

She was all compassion, noting that she hadn’t experienced chemo and didn’t know what I was facing. She was there for me. Again. And I let her be that person, again. I recognized a side of her that I hadn’t allowed myself to see in a year. I’d almost robbed us both of that by comparing.

Two days later she had her last MRI and was put on palliative care.

So damn all the rubrics and the contexts. What it comes down to are the moments of love. We should all be friggin lucky enough to still get to have these moments while we are living in our crepey skin!

We should all be so lucky as to have sat hip-to-hip on a cold rock, in a cold drizzle, drinking coffee from a metal thermos, staring at the mystery of a patch of blood on the ice in the middle of nowhere.

And to keep learning about the world.

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I’m still going to feel sad about not going hiking this summer.