I am Tired.... of doctors and hospitals. Tired of needles and scans and flashlights waking you in the middle of the night. I am tired - particularly - of bone biopsies (After all how many samples of my marrow does anyone need?). Someday it may all be over, meanwhile I try to relax and think of the past. I do not (or try not to) consider the future too often. The problem is my past is too muddled and uncertain, the only thing I have are words. Words that have flowed into me and become a part of my existence. In fact (as sad or great as it may be) they define me, without them I do not exist, except in form. My form is only sinew and cell, but myself is grammer and syllable - word and sentence. So I write and think of previous words. Words I have formed and words that have been formed for me. I think back to words and how they have formed me.

One of the books that has formed me the most was Shelley's Frankenstein. I am, I think now, something like frankenstein, a role that I was, perhaps, always meant to play. I am risen from both beds and books. Like a shadow, I am emerging. Doctors have saved me literally from death, but not all of me. Something else died, and that was a sense of myself. One that I have not quite found again. I wander around, like frankenstein, not understanding the images which lay before me. I was expelled from a previous eden and am lost in the wilderness of my body and my mind.

"Did I ask thee maker..." begins the novel. The hardest thing is being your own maker and so I rise once again from the shadowy figures of words that scatter like blood or raindrops across my body, that has been saved for everyone else but not for me. It doesn't even seem a part of me anymore. So I think of past words, of the shadowy Creature - for his name is not Frankenstein - in the hills of Switzerland listening to the family read and speak. Here he learns, but doesn't entirely understand. Concepts he can grasp, but relations elude him. He is a shadow rising from the words and ideas which he hears. So, I think, am I.

Perhaps this is the fate of those still suffering. To be a shadow searching for themselves again. It is, at least, for me.

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