To Touch a Diseased Body

To touch a diseased body is powerful.
To watch a pillowy torso turn to a rocky terrain.
They mark her body with sharpies, map where her tumors are and point radiation into her abdomen. Her waist is bruised around her sides from injections, as if she’d been beaten and kicked.
She lies in a hot bath before me, naked, her body exposed and falling, wrinkles appearing at the corner of her mouth overnight. Her forehead wrinkles with concern, she can’t tell the difference between dreams and visions.
What is reality to any of us, anymore?
Time is lost in hospitals. A week is gone in a flash of a camera which strives to only capture what unity we have, bouquets in a corner, Mylar balloons with superficial prayers, a Chia pet farm in the window.
I rub her feet, I want to push the tumors from her body, I work her feet like dough, I watch her eyes tighten and her words stop when I find a spot behind her ankle bone, the pressure point for the ovaries, the place she feels so much relief when I coax the soft and pliable skin through my fingers.
I clean their house which has been left for days, maybe weeks, without being swept.
There are bags of movies that people have brought to occupy their minds.
The port for the chemo dangles from her arm, a purple and blue rubber cord bobs each time she reaches her arms to hug me. She can’t hug me long. Her body quivers, her hands shake. She has not yet cried on me, not until I kneel in front of her and hold her face in my hands and look her in the eyes. We stare at each other without saying anything, for so many minutes, blinking, and yet we hold our stares. She suddenly looks confused and smirks, she asks me what I am doing and I laugh as I cry.
I feel as if I am saying goodbye, as if we have words for one another even though we don’t have words. I get one chance to tell her before I leave, so I take the chance to tell her and this is what I say “I will support you not matter what direction of treatment you take. If you want to fight I will fight with you, and if you don’t then I support you". I think she hears me this time. We hold each other and she clutches and shakes out a few tears.
I am afraid I will never see her again that my last memory will be of me leaving her on her couch, when I feel like I should be with her for the journey. The entire journey. I just want to be there.