The last few days I have been struggling. It seems that in order to continue I must face a deep fear of mine. Last night a story that I have always kept hidden and seem to never tell, except to lovers, I begin writing. It is the story of a time when I was 17. It altered the many years not yet come. It was a physical change that came over me, through surgery. And it has taken me to places and given me relationships that I never would have had. Through the physical came the thoughts that never would have come. Looking back I can see why it all needed to happen. But as I was experiencing them, there were times of great happiness and then there were times of eminence sadness. In the times of sadness there would sometimes come confusion within a void of understanding. And in some ways maybe it was always the Plan.

Now in the last few weeks, with sitting again in the sounds, the smells, the sights, but most importantly, the deep interior of my being, the fear has seem to fade. So I will tell the story of how my life was alter and how it’s direction was changed for the first time.


9:14 pm 5/18/10

My father was sitting next to me. There were two maybe three days left of my junior year of high school. The last days of the preceding January my grandmother who had been living with us passed away. Looking back all these years from now, I see that her death was the beginning of a chain of events that would be invisible to the eye, but yet the years would reveal.

My father was silent and so was I. We were just north of 16th street at a “urology” office. A word I had not heard of until a few days before.

Just after my grandmother died I noticed one of my testicles was beginning to grow larger than the other. No one I told, there was no pain. It was months later when its’ size could not be denied, I told my father.

The doctor called me in, it didn’t take long, a flashlight in a darken room. He sent me out and called in my father. I heard them talking in muffled sound. My father came out slowly. He was looking at the floor when he told me, that the following Monday I would be expected and they would be waiting to admit me to begin the process of removing the cancer.