Belong

It's the title of a dance piece I saw recently by Bangarra Dance Theatre.
It's only now, as I get closer to the time when The Lump is to be removed that I sense the need to 'belong' is so fundamentally deep that I can hardly function in anything other than, the tribe I know.


Longing. To Be-long, not short of anything least of all love.
Knowing that I am that with them, gives me form and strength.
No surprise that exile is the harshest of punishments.
Hard to understand why splits are ubiquitous.
Being alone with the longing.


They tell you the statistical risk of something going wrong,
You hear about the super bugs that crawl the walls in hospitals,
You are made to understand what will happen,
The size and selection of of  muscle groups to be removed,
The blood I will need from, 'God bless them' other people.


Maybe it's because, 'going under the knife' marks a reference among the birthdays and public holidays.
The inner preparation is not the same as ironing a shirt and making lunch.
This is one date where I belong and those who do too, gather.
What is more important than family, in any language or culture?
What is more important than the sound and confident strumming of hearts?


I'm going to ask the surgeon to take photographs and I guess I will want to place them in this space.
Not something for the sqeamish I suspect. 
I was asleep on the couch recently and woke gazing at my pulse in the crook of my arm throbbing gently as it does all the time.  It's that it pumps day and night and in all those times when I have no awareness of its work that I am grateful for its routine determination.  And it is in me, with me, I am it and it is me and yet I see it as a pump serving me but I am the pump, I am the backbeat I cannot loose.