Another time...another place.

I spoke to my dear friend Amy today.  As I relayed to her the reality of fear in my gut, I was comforted by her wise reply.  "Sara, the body you have today is completely different from the body you had two years ago.  Everything about you is different.  Everything about everything is different." 

I heard her loud and clear.  You can't project the past onto the future, because, even if "you" think "you" are the same person who might get the same thing...."you"....aren't. 

What do I mean by that? 

Hummmm.....well....let's see.  .  .In biology, we learned that we are a compilation of ever changing matter.  We breathe out our cells, and breath in newness.  Every part of every one of us is completely different every single year.  This is why we sometimes witness miraculous change in disease factors....why we see things differently from year to year....we are ever changing.  We are not stagnant.  We are....change.

So, though memory and circumstance plague us, and tell us that something IS....in reality, it ISN'T.  Not NOW anyway. 

I was a woman who watched her beautiful teen son on the brink of death.  His stunning face mangled by harsh pavement.  And though I have those vivid and horrible memories....I am not THERE.  I am here.   The lungs that breathed in the smells of the hospital do not have a trace of that reality in them anymore.  I am here. 

I was a woman who held a dead baby in her arms, drifting away in a haze of allergic reaction to a poison specific to my body.  Opiates.  They screw me up....in a very real way....a deadly way.  My body, two years later...has no trace of that day.  I remember it.  It has made me who I am....but my physical body....is not the same.  Nor is my understanding of life.  Or death.

I was a woman who bled to death...only to discover that the cause was a retained baby that SOMEONE should have known was there.  But...no one did.  Not until....later. 

That woman was filled with masses of blood clots and rotting tissue that, at one time, had been my baby...my twin son.  Rotting tissue that filled me with heaviness and poison....rotting tissue that could have killed me from blood poisoning....

Months of regular periods have flushed out that uterus...months of exercise and healthy eating have cleaned this system, leaving me healthier than ever before. 

There is memory...oh yes....muscle memory...cell memory...nervous system memory......

But...it's a memory.  Not a physical reality.

What has happened doesn't mar the now with anything more than...memory.

Somehow, hearing my friend describe my body as a different body...in a different time....in a different circumstance...

Well, it gave me a smile.  It gave me some hope.  It gave me a vision of reality that I really needed.

I remember.  I remember it all.  And, I am willing to make some new memories in honor of the old.  I am a new person.  A bigger person.  A wider person.  A more whole, if somewhat broken, person.

I see life in a new way.

I'm open to life in a new way.

I want life...in a new way.

So....2011....BRING IT ON!  This girl is NEW.  This woman has potential!  I will not be defined by the past.

I am here.

Now.