The Tree of Togetherness
by Michael Nagle
Kirk Read, The Trees Hold All the Secrets, analog collage with telephone pole posters on paper, 10 x 14 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
The Tree of Togetherness
Michael Nagle | NOV 2024 | Issue 39
1. The Trunk
I was his and he was mine.
“I’ll love you til you die.”
2. First branch. The beginning.
Once upon a time, I was his, and he was mine. Now, no longer. The fireworks ended fifteen years ago and our paths diverged. Transitioned from being each other’s present to being each other’s past. From being each other’s meaning to being each other’s story.
When I found out I was going to die, he called me every day. I didn’t pick up. I was too pissed off at the whole entire world to bother, and anyways, wasn’t he my past?
It took me a week and a lifetime and an infinity to pick up the phone.
The message was clear.
“I’ll love you til you die.”
2a. First branch, first sub branch. Visiting.
It took me a week and a lifetime and an infinity to pick up the phone.
But I did.
I often stylize myself as a cat. Haughty, regal, delicate, opinionated, judgmental.
But deep down — wanting only love and attention.
I style him as a dog. Loyal, patient, well meaning, good natured. Calm, present, persistent. Not one of those small co-dependent yip yip dogs.
Over the coming weeks and months my life would change, a kind of medical freefall. The cancer led to chemotherapy. The chemotherapy led to short term nausea meds, to long term nausea meds, to steroids, to crushing levels of fatigue. The steroids led to CBD gummies, the fatigue to float tanks. It was an endless stack of self-preservation. All I did those first few months was try desperately to learn how to tread water.
He came first in December. Drove me fifty miles to see a famous oncologist who would by the end of the day tell me that my first chemotherapy, in fact, was not working. I had a chemotherapy pump in me the whole day. I was exhausted. I slept in his lap in the waiting room, feeling like I’d pass out. We lied when a nurse asked us if we knew how to disconnect the pump before a needed CT scan that day. We looked it up on YouTube, did our best, and shoved the toxic tubing into a glove, then all that into the pump’s bag, and considered it DIY-good enough.
And then in May, he was there when the famous oncologist told me it was “good” that my cancer wasn’t spreading, and I thought “good” would mean the cancer was shrinking, and I was sad and defeated, I was working the hardest I’ve ever worked and the cancer wasn’t shrinking,
And then in August, he just came, spending most of the summer month with me, his partner home with their child, walking with me in short, five-minute rounds — all I could handle after two major abdominal surgeries, five minutes and I’d be winded, I’d be out of breath, my heart rate would spike to 170, I’d be confronted by my frailty, and he’d walk with me, and sit on benches with me, and get the car when I couldn’t walk more, and be there.
The message was clear.
2b. First branch, second sub branch. Our Family.
It took me a week and a lifetime and an infinity to pick up the phone.
Eventually he said, “we’d have you be part of our family if you wanted.”
There is a kind of listening which is mild, muted, agreeable. People say nice things. You say nice things back. The answer to “how are you?” is always good.
And then there is a kind of listening that acknowledges that everything can change in the present moment.
“We’d move to make it work,” he said.
The message was clear.
2c. First branch, third sub branch. Tell him from me, too.
It took me a week and a lifetime and an infinity to pick up the phone.
Eventually, I did.
It was one day in the August month of warm Los Angeles days and surgery rehabilitation walks.
“I was talking to my partner, and she wanted to tell you that we’d have you be part of our family. ‘I know, I said to her, I already told him.’ ‘No but you have to tell him that message from me, too.’”
There was an underline in his voice. Same message, but also, new message.
The message was clear.
2d. First branch, fourth sub branch. Already.
It took me a week and a lifetime and an infinity to pick up the phone.
I told my therapist about the offer to join their family.
That they’d be willing to move to make it work.
“I think if they’re considering moving to include you,” he said, “you’re already part of the family.”
The message was clear.
3. The second branch. Letting him in.
I was his, and he was mine, from the time I was roughly seventeen to twenty-four in my life. We were connected by a teenage telepathic bond. Our love spanned James Joyce and talking stuffed animals and chaos theory. Our love was like finding the conversation partner you’d been looking for your whole life.
He started taking care of me when I became catastrophically ill a year ago. I was so surprised. I’d thought we’d already written our last chapter in each other’s lives. He’d always been the steadier of the two of us — the ballast to my waves. He kept showing up in my illness until I let him in.
What an utter relief he was. Care was assembled quickly and urgently. I had no warning for any and everything that was coming, the descent into bi-weekly chemotherapy, the void.
Friends of mine rented an airbnb studio near my mom’s house in Los Angeles so they could stay there and help me through the unknown horror.
I’d figured the studio was being paid for by the handful of friends I have who’d made obscene amounts of money in Silicon Valley. I was astonished when I found out he was. He was just a dad, in Providence Rhode Island, with a normal job and a kid and a mortgage.
He was nonplussed about it when I asked him if it was true. “I plan to help you until you die,” he said, “and I hope I come to regret that decision.”
Or, in other words:
“I’ll love you til you die.”
3a. Second branch, first sub branch. It’s not time yet.
We were connected by a teenage telepathic bond. I don’t know if there's anyone in the world who can read me better.
I had been a long river of sadness all day, that day in May, when my famous oncologist told me the scan results were good and I wanted to argue that no, no this was not good, because I was living a life on chemotherapy, and the cancer wasn’t shrinking.
I was so bereft, we got Indian food afterwards out in the San Gabriel Valley, and just the simple warmth of the waitress cheered me up.
I was sad and we were snuggling when we got home, and he said he was going to sleep, to give me some space, when I burst out crying, and he just said “oh, ok. It’s not time to go yet,” lightness in his voice, he came back to the bed, a hand on my hand, a hand on my leg, a gesture that it wasn’t time to leave me alone yet.
What an utter relief he was.
3b. Second branch, second sub branch. Unmaking, remaking.
We were connected by a teenage telepathic bond. Is that how it is for all great loves? Time moves on, but the connection still lasts? A dormant tendril from heart to heart, ready to be excavated in a time of need? A break open in case of emergency kind of love, walled off by the historical time of glass?
Our teenage love had been so bright and so painful to me, it was a marvel to revisit it and have it not hurt. Deep down, I struggle to believe in human growth or human maturity. And yet, here we were, close again, and I wasn’t coming apart. There was room for the connection amidst our two divergent lives.
It was May, and I hadn’t dialed down the steroids, the dexamethasone, all the way yet. I think dex must be any long-term meditator’s nightmare, to have one’s mood and body and mind so chemically hijacked beyond the reach of any psychospiritual tool. The dex made me chatty. Maybe the way friendly drunks get. Talk talk talk talk talk.
“If the only man I loved — ” (me!) “— I was super in love with, but ultimately didn’t want to have sex with” (who knows how he actually put it, he’s less blunt than me) “I figured I must be grudgingly straight.”
The cat in me was satisfied with this label, “super in love with.”
I think of queerness as a remaking of love, sex, relationship, but here was a sort of unmaking and remaking, a resituating of young teenage love into whoever it is who can walk with you into the oncologist’s review of a scan that isn’t what you want to hear, and then stay with you when the tears come crashing out, unbidden, unannounced, and be the ballast to my always waves.
What an utter relief he was.
Michael Nagle is a queer, Sri Lankan-American writer living in his hometown of Los Angeles, where he’s undergoing treatment for metastatic colon cancer. He is deeply interested in writing as a vector for raw, messy, vulnerability that slips under our collective defenses and wakes us up to the more beautiful lives we know in our hearts is possible. And doing this with humor, joy, and wit. Portland, OR and Cambridge, MA both feel like second homes and if he had a choice he would take rebirth as a well-pampered cat.
Kirk Read is the author of How I Learned to Snap (Penguin) and has an essay in the forthcoming anthology Witch from Dopamine Press. He won a Bronze award from Contemporary Collage Magazine for his series of abstract telephone pole collages and was shortlisted for a series of collages done on the walls of outhouses at Wolf Creek radical faerie sanctuary. He lives in Portland, OR and co-leads the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective.