It Is

The best thing about being told you’re dying and feeling enough like it to be convinced is that you console yourself.

You develop habits of looking at your ordinary days in terms of mild admonishment and surprise—this is life, this is being alive, this is ebbing away.

Then someone gives you the all-clear.

It’s temporary, of course, and contingent, as living always was before you were officially dying, but it feels different.

You walk out into a hot afternoon complete with tiger swallowtails in the cottonwoods and painter-seducing clouds heaped over the cliffs, and you wonder what now you’re supposed to do with this, if it’s not on the point of vanishing.

You pretend it is.