It's like telling a stranger

'Maybe,' the blog name for an old and strangely endearing friend of my mine recently had surgery to remove a mass from his lung. He called me the day before the surgery to let me know and told me I was on the list of people his girlfriend was to call if anything went wrong. Last time Maybe had surgery, it was an emergency removal of his gall bladder. When he got out of the hospital, he wrote me a long e-mail telling me what happened. His e-mail concluded with something along the lines of 'I just wanted to tell someone everything that happened, not for sympathy, but just so someone would know. Writing you was like sending a post card to Post Secret.' He had a girlfriend at that time as well but telling someone who wasn't there, well sometimes you just want to tell a story.

Post Secret for the second to last person on earth who doesn't know what it is (I only say that because *I* know what it is and I am usually the last person to get the memo) is a public confessional. No response is necessary or even possible but your story gets an audience. The things people confess are sometimes whimsical but often they are heavy and deeply affecting. Like snail-mail twitter with no attribution. So when Maybe compared me to this book, I knew exactly where he was coming from. He could be miserable, dramatic, throw a complete damn tantrum and I could just take it in without reflexive lament or attempts to comfort or commiserate. I could just ooh and ahh and offer the 'anything' that people always do only once without being frustrated with the expected 'no' in response.

With the time between wondering what is going on and knowing what is going on with the trouble-maker lymph node, my personal post secret community is the best thing going. People who can randomly know something about you but you really don't have to worry about them following-up or even remembering. Maybe, both for his temperament and his very recent experience at the hospital I will probably use make him ideal. Today, he wanted to see and touch the lump and it was just kind of funny. He touched it, laughed and said, 'oh yea, I can totally feel that,' and then we moved on without further comment to a discussion of how his doctor doesn't get any of his sports analogies.

I can not get into an emotional deep dive on stuff like this. A missed opportunity to get the number of the cute boy that I talked to in line at Ross; that I can get sad and emotionally twisted about. But this, no. I just don't like knowing. What it is now, it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. What can I really worry about? I feel about this how I feel about the question of whether I will ever get married. That question will be answered one way or another, it's the wait to find out that wears on me.

Random parting shot; I hate fasting bloodwork. Nothing brings the full attention of my mental faculties to hunger like knowing I can not eat.