The question, “how are you?” loses meaning as you wait. The specificity of the context, the need to reassure people, the need to assess you own honest answer, render any answer inadequate. “Numb,” is mine.

This numbness comes not from feeling too much or too little, but from holding all feelings at arm’s length simultaneously. Fear, dread, hope, guilt, grief, empathy, sympathy, the past, the future, any moment that is not this precise one right here when I can pat his hand or give him a sip of water or get my mother a ham sandwich or hug my brother like he’s still a little boy rather than the solid rock of us all or write this all out in a line so it will all go forward and not in loops. Only this moment can be borne as a bubble of limited feeling and thought. Any others are too much, too many, too like disembowelment.

Don’t mistake the numbness for whatever we in the West think is Zen. That would be a state of acceptance. This is not acceptance. Acceptance of the worst is betrayal. This is not the opposite of acceptance, either, it is not avoidance. The body is so fragile, and Frankenstein operations are both amazing and frightening. This is just a space in which to function rationally.