A Curious Moon

By Phiroozeh Petigara

Just as I get on the trail, my foot begins to hurt, sharp pinpoints of pain with every step. I stop, breathe, seethe. There are no benches for me to rest on. I walk and stop, walk and stop, until finally a clearing catches my eye, a beam of sun spotlighting the perfect sized boulder for me to sit on, an invitation from mother nature. I yank off my shoes and socks and place my feet on the forest floor. Why didn’t my foot tell me it was planning to hurt before I came all the way into the forest?  

The twigs and tiny pinecones massage my feet and a smile breaks onto my face. Instantly, my anger passes. The forest floor is rain-softened and cool to my soles. I turn my face to the sun streaming in through the trees. I’m ok. In this moment, I’m ok. 

I’m not ok though. I am sick with no sign of recovery. I am horrified that the prednisone the doctor prescribed me, “for just a few months”, over the winter created the illusion that I was healing. But as soon as I stopped, it was back to the Before Times. Day after day in bed, cancellations of plans and of clients. 

This patch of nature near my house, this urban park in downtown Vancouver, like a mini Central Park, is my one savior. Each morning it rejuvenates me, giving me back what the preceding night’s pain has wrung from my spirit. It is a tedious dance between filling my well just about two inches only to have it sucked dry. Never full. But also never empty. 

Each morning, I wander different gardens, enjoying the bare winter branches glistening with raindrops, then the first buds of spring that soon burst with cherry blossoms and wide white magnolias before giving way to lush rhododendrons of fiery pinks and earthy orange. I find nooks and crannies in which to bathe in birdsong, and at the sea that adjoins the park, I watch bald eagles lazily circle the water below for their morning meal. I leave the park with my cheeks hurting from smiling at all the nature. 

I have spent the last few weeks awash in anger – when my knee clicks hard and painful, when my shoulder re-stiffens and each night, as I struggle and squirm to hold my wife in bed without searing pain shooting in my palm and up my arm, the roar between my ears is ocean-loud. 

Slithery voices wake me at night: your sisters sure are enjoying their life. One is in Mexico, the other calls you what, once a month? How easy they have it, hey? I toss and turn but sleep is replaced by more and more toxic messages. How quick you were to make up with them, after they kicked you in the teeth, how quick you were to accept their flimsy selfish excuses for abandoning you in your time of need. After losing hours of sleep, I often spend the following day in bed numbing out with TV trying to silence those awful night messages. 

Sitting on the boulder, I bend forward and run my hands over the glistening brown carpet of fallen pine needles decorating the forest floor. My hands begin to shape small twigs into a summer wreath. I take the bouquet of wildflowers I’d been collecting and I weave the buttercups and tendrils of wild grass into my wreath. 

As my hands work the earth, I suddenly remember what my partner told me about her family: her dear aunt contracted a fatal case of meningitis as a child, was told she would not live long. My partner’s father, upon the advice of a local indigenous healer, took his sister to the beach every day and stood her knee deep in the hot sand so her body could heal and she could walk again. He did this every day for years. She was expected to live to maybe 18 or 20. Today, she is 74. 

As I recall this story, the forest floor whispers to me: There are families who watch out for each other. I add a small piece of tree bark whose bright green mossy patch brightens my wreath, and large tears fly down my nose and onto the earth. 

Your family abandoned you. They abandoned you but my love, they abandon each other too. Your grandmother sits alone all day at 97, barely seeing and hearing while around her everyone lives their life. They don’t visit on her birthday because it is not convenient. Your mother and aunt barely speak except to care for their mother. 

Your sisters send you careless invitations to indoor gatherings instead of making an iota of effort for your immunocompromised state. Abandonment is your family’s legacy. It is your inherited trauma but it is not you. 

My wife’s father loads his ailing sister onto his bicycle in Tanzania. He is maybe 15 or 16, she might be 8 or 10. When I was 15, my baby sister two, I would gather her in a snuggy and walk her to the park, holding her pudgy little hand, guiding her down the slide, delighting in her delight as I taught her to blow on a dandelion. 

My wife’s father stands his sister in the ocean, holding her unsteady body, convincing her to stay in just a little longer, communicating with her with single words and specific gestures that have been stitched together to form her vocabulary, that my wife uses with her today, that I’ve learned to use when we all spend time together.

My sister explained to me that she couldn’t show up for me the day I begged her to because she had plans with her boyfriend. It was either piss him off by taking time for me or piss me off. She just kind of made a choice. 

There is more than one type of family. 

I thank the forest for its message. I put on my socks and my shoes and I walk back down the trail and I meet my wife and her aunt. I kiss my wife’s soft lips, taking in her smile, she is always so happy to see me. I duck into the backseat and kiss her aunt on her soft cheek and I point to my cheek and she gives me a light peck. Playfully scolds me, “Let’s go, it’s time for tea,” with a big smile.

Phi Petigara is a writer and coach for writers who procrastinate. She writes into the intersections of disability, queerness and different-ness in a brown immigrant body. As a writing coach, Phi helps writers to who procrastinate to examine their thoughts about their writing (ie. the mind gremlins) so they can write with consistency and confidence. Phi is a Capricorn Sun, Gemini Moon and Leo Rising.