Chapter 10: Walking (Backward): Giving Identity a Moving Place

We begin on a beach in Tofino, Canada. I recuperate there following surgery for breast cancer. I am acutely aware of the uncertainty of my future even though I am identified as “survivor.” My bones creak with the rhythms of this tide. The weightiness, pressures and pains of heteronormativity, childhood trauma and cancer rush at me, through me. I have been “surviving” for so long that I doubt my own feelings, my own experiences. My thinking seems muddled and I lean into the little spirit that is left to get me through these next few months. Exhaustion penetrates the rhythms of my breathing; I am close to losing my capacity for resistance. I am vapor where past, present, and future are bound to my cells. I whisper: “I want a big love.”