What is this word that begins so many endings or disappears as a mere mistake?  What is it that arrests the attention of someone who spends a career staring at shadows? 

This ultimate darkness between the looming shapes of life emerges into visibility and drags with it life and death.  What is this spot sighted two days after an x-ray gained my release from Emergency, when the fun of my birthday party had left me grimacing with chest pain?

They said it was negative then.  Did the spot emerge thereafter, after I threw off the warmed blankets and backward cotton gown and followed the arrows to “exit?”

Or was it seen but considered no reason to keep me overnight then, spots being so much more flexible as problems than heart attacks?  As I walked past triage with a relieved step, did the nurses exchange glances, thinking compassionately, “Spot?”

This spot, ostensibly deeply part of myself gone awry, enters my life as a functionally external force over which I have no power, no recourse.  This spot carries the scepter of ends and beginnings to all activity.  It is the monarch of years and decades, before which every day falls to its knees.

And it’s probably, statistically, nothing.  A play of darkness among the body’s inner shadows that will fail to be there two days hence on the follow-up x-ray. 

Regardless, I have brought this nebulous spot with me to the mountains, pursuing the same course I had laid out before the phone call that almost shifted my priorities.  My doctor could barely talk to me at first, having just bitten into an apple.

Seriously.  Who takes a bite of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil just before telling someone they have a spot on the upper lobe of their left lung?  My doctor, whom I actually like so far, that’s who.  To be fair, he never did say that I have this spot, or that my lung does, or even the x-ray.  What he said (which is the real truth) is that a (one of an unknown number) radiologist has seen a spot in a place on the x-ray that corresponds to that part of my lung.

All very, very hypothetical so far, except for the mountains, and the apple.

If not for the mountains, I might know already if the spot was never more than a chimera, a radiological faux pas.  But to get that knowledge so quickly I would have had to give up these days of rest and rejuvenation in the dirt and sunshine world of flesh and blood, so I’ve let the spot come with me, trailing its promises, lies and remarkable illustration of life’s delusions, in all its potential for suffering or for sudden awakening from what may not ever really have been true.

P.S. It turned out to be nothing, just an ‘artifact.’  From 2009