I Think I Jumped a Timeline To Wake You Up

Never name your titanium implant. No one told me not to. There are different kinds. Cork. Hourglass. Horseshoe. Suspicious lesion lucky charms. That's not funny, Rosebud. It is, though. Funny as in strange. As in (your word), suspicious. What's even funnier: how a few tissue samples became eight. You took eight. Size does matter. What's funnier yet: for weeks, I feel that loss in swelling, perhaps to make up for what was taken. All my life I've been told, in various situations: Don't get too attached. Now’s when I need to hear it. My left side, never acting right to begin with, has developed a new taste for the dramatics. Um, yes, your body might be rejecting the titanium. So I'm advised to wait and see. Originally, wait and see was what I could not do, hence the biopsy. Hence the titanium implant, as small as a grain of sand, you'd said. I was very pleased when I heard the news. I'm like anyone else, a sucker for the miniature. I root for the runt. I'm quite small myself. I would say we had an instant connection, and that I've become protective over what should be protecting me: its original purpose, to mark the suspicious area. How's that for a stance. How's that for strong conviction? Hurray for progress. Forward, march—halt: I have to go back in six months for a new ultrasound of the area. Because post-surgery it was inconclusive. Story of my life. Equation of my life. I'm more interested in the hydra monster of mysteries. I love that they haven't found the graviton yet. I hope they do. I hope it gives them a lot more problems. So you can understand why my body might be rejecting the titanium I was so keen to have: I love learning all the math and then writing the most outlandish science fiction of poetry. Vampire bunnies who suck on gravitons and become truly massless. That's a physics joke. It's much simpler: when I say I wasn't surprised the findings were inclusive, I heard benign. I did not want to be beholden. What do you mean? I mean, one day everything we can imagine will be real and there will be no more science fiction. I mean, I write poems instead of tinkering with math because I don't want to make testable predictions. In that case, you could've been a string theorist. Ha. Now that's funny. Collider shots fired. Higgs help us. Tell me how I can help. You can't. Why. Because I'm a willing participant. I'm too keen on the science. I thought you chose poetry. I didn't choose poetry over science. Would never. Don't have to. Stop trying to make a measurement of me; I'm not the problem. I'm here, there, poof. That was a physics joke. I get you. Can I examine the area? I don't believe in death, to be clear. Or rather: my point of view does not allow for death. My imagination is out of control, as I've often been told. And my imagination is currently jumping timelines to wake me up. I cannot prove this. I am at the point in my life where I am okay not being able to prove this. I am not reckless with mathematics. I promise, math and literature are necessary for the evolution of the imagination. I don't doubt that. Rosebud, can you feel this? Sort of. It's a dull, sharp ache. How can it be dull and sharp? You tell me; it's your titanium marker. What about this? Okay, that hurts. Listen, I wanted to tell you: before the anesthesia set in, the surgeons and nurses were all calling out ready. When I started to close with the darkness, I called out ready and heard their gossamer laughter soften in the operating room— Don't use gossamer, Rosebud, a certain physicist friend insists. I'm home now and all the doc came up with is wait and see. I would jump a timeline, but I'll stay here a bit with my physicist friend. He can be difficult, but I like him quite a bit, despite siccing elementary particles on him in poems. Elementary particles you invented. I know, I know. Elementary particles with names like the Electracon. You say that like it's allegedly its name. Again, you called it the Electra-CON. What do you expect? Nothing. I expect nothing. I wanted to create new elements because the Periodic Table was not enough. And to create new elements, I needed to create new particles. Perhaps one day you’ll find evidence of them in your particle colliders. Perhaps metaphor is more real than you imagine. Perhaps it's okay to admit you’re scared, Rosebud. It's okay to speak plainly about that. But if I may: science uses metaphor all the time. Hence your use of electron cloud. Hence my use gossamer instead of plainly saying death or dead. Rosebud. I know, I know. I just want you to heal. Why is healing the objective? No, really: why? Because I'm out here, collecting all kinds of un-everyday elements. Before titanium, it was the gadolinium goblins in my MRI contrast (accuracy be damned, they are goblins). Want me to get real, do you. Well, imagine being strapped in and stuck in a head cage as they look at your brain and spine and then the goblins flow through an IV and you know you are going to vomit but can't move. That's awful. No worries: I just jumped a timeline to have the technicians come in time, so I wouldn't choke to gossamer. Sometimes I worry I'm leaving a trail of gossamer me's behind in various abandoned timelines. Like I said, there's no death or dead in this situation because I don't believe in either. It's not my point of view. Gossamer is functioning as a stand-in for death. Accuracy sacrificed. I'm sorry if I'm upsetting anyone. Let's move past this. Let me tell you how fucking fabulous titanium is (Tom Ford, don't sue me). As you know, I'm writing a sonnet for each element in the periodic table, and with titanium, I celebrated this titan of the elements, the strongest lightweight metal, originating in the death of stars. I drifted into half-gossamer, dreaming about my soon-to-be little implant which is (humblebrag) also found in sunscreen, smokescreens, Boeing 737 Dreamliners, and the International Space Station. I'm basically part-Titan now. I was terribly loose with particle poetic physics in my Atomic Sonnets. All discovery is a translation of what we encounter. How can there not be a measurement problem? You know this, dear scientist, dear doctor who made me give up my bismuth collection—which I made at home—because it's slightly radioactive and let's just not take that chance and, hey, at least you can collect oxygen, that's free, right? Very funny indeed. Two days after surgery, I took a five-hour flight to see my family in South Texas. For many reasons, being around my Mexican family, who are Catholic, has strengthened my faith in God as a Jew. At this point in my life, I'm an equation done wrestling to make sense of itself, now wrestling with the very funny ways in which love drives me forward, stops me when I need to halt. And here's another truth: my Aunt Nena died last October, following my Uncle Balani, her beloved, when she jumped a timeline to wake up with him. Wherever they might be now, I have to accept my own brushes with gossamer and those to come. Because my memories of childhood in the Rio Grande Valley will inevitably grow further away from me on the space-time continuum, I tumble with all the contradictions and broken calculations that come with loving so many types of people, regardless of differences. By which I mean, like my little titanium warrior, I'm saying grief is a bridge that compelled me to make a trip I medically shouldn't have made because I knew what sort of time and space would get me through this next chapter, and that was being with my Gomez family, with the people who believed me when I said that on the night Aunt Nena died—which I didn't hear about till the next morning—I was woken up by a feeling of gossamer cloth wrapped around my left arm, my side that sometimes tremors or goes numb, and I called out into the darkness: Uncle Balani, let me sleep. I have no evidence. I cannot prove this. My family doesn't need to because we share this funny bond that for all my years of tangling with gossamer brings me back from doubt and fear. A bond which keeps me knowing that one day there will be a great shift in our understanding of the biggest unsolved problems in physics. It's happened before. Take the Arrow of Time: what happens cannot unhappen. 'ch yeah, sure—for now. I have plans for all the plucky, theoretical and highly unlikely particles you can't find in your large colliders, and even those aren't enough for me. Which is why I created new particles and elements to impishly sic on dear realists in poems. All bark, no bite, they are. They just want you to see their imaginations. They don't want you to reject them because you haven't found them yet. But instead to understand that, perhaps, you've been going the wrong way in trying to find them. All those dead ends. Which is why I'm jumping timelines, friends. To wake you and me up. I don't mind waiting and seeing with my implant. The pain is now medium, at most a nuisance with a sting that unfurls like a spiderweb’s pulse. I won't give up. I don't give up on funny diagnoses, on hard conversations. I don't give up on people. But what if your body is rejecting it? I'm already made up of many things that don't form a recognizable whole. So might as well give it my best shot. Okay. Thanks, friend. And you, Doc—okay? Okay. But wait—what did you name it? Yes, yes. What else could it be? You haven't said yet— But, like I said: what else could it be? In this rare case, I acknowledge the singular definition of a thing. Friends, this is Aurora. Her name is Aurora Q. Ben-Oni (before you ask, the Q. doesn't stand for anything and is in any case silent). Welcome, Aurora [xxx], my little hourglass without grains of time. Thank you, my suspicious-lesion lucky charm. It's late now. The lamplight is low, the cat is yowling for attention, and the sun will rise in a few hours. Get your beauty rest. Because come tomorrow I hope you're ready. I'm no Boeing 737 Dreamliner, but I can promise you, my little titanium sweet, it's going to be a weird, wild ride—