Flatness
Flatness
Faith and fear both ask you to believe in something you cannot see.
I did not know this for most of my life. I learned it slowly. By watching my own face in the mirror when news arrived. By noticing what did not happen in my chest when my mother called from Malaysia. By keeping track, across the years, of the moments my body should have broken and did not.
The not-breaking was not bravery. It was a kind of mechanical failure in the place where fear is supposed to live. Something I needed to picture could not be pictured. The future stayed blank. Because it stayed blank, the fear did not come.
I have spent most of my life going blank like this.
My mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in her fifties sometime in the early 2000s. I was in my twenties, in Louisiana, in the middle of a green card process that my immigration attorney told me not to interrupt.
“Stay,” he said. Do not leave the country. Not even for a week.
The paperwork was in motion. My mother was a school principal in Seremban. She had a hysterectomy, and she went through chemotherapy. My father sent me the updates by phone. I sent her money when I could. The ringgit had collapsed by then, and my parents could not help me anymore, so the money I sent was not much, but I sent it.
I called her when I could. She called me when she could. International long distance was not cheap in 2002 and 2003, but I paid the bills and made the calls. As I sat at the kitchen table at Sunny Lane with a receiver pressed to my ear, her voice came through with the slight delay that used to mark international calls.
I told her she would be fine.
I told her the mind could heal the body.
I told her to stay positive. Every American self-help line I had ever read was delivered in a second language across fifteen thousand miles to a woman who was consumed by the cancer I was coaching her to survive.
And one night, on one of those calls, I went flat.
I cannot picture the kitchen. I cannot remember what she said that night that was different from any other call. I remember only the arrival of the flatness. It was a cold space opening inside my chest where grief was supposed to be and a blank where fear was supposed to be. The numbness was not the kind where a hand falls asleep. It was the kind where a phone line goes dead in the middle of a call, and no one realizes for a few seconds that they are still talking.
I tried to picture a future without her.
Nothing came.
I tried to picture the house in Seremban without her cooking in the kitchen. I tried to picture my father alone in it. Each image dissolved before it could form. The mind produces pictures the way the body produces sweat. Automatically. In response to signals. The signals were all there, but the pictures were not coming.
Underneath was the other blank. My own body, which should have been on a plane, could not be on a plane. The attorney had said, “Stay.” The house on Sunny Lane was held by a mortgage that required a job that required a visa that required the paperwork not to be disturbed. Every structure I had built was a lock on the door.
Two doors closed at once. The future with her gone would not form. The present in which she was dying was not available to reach. The body, faced with two closed doors, does one thing. It stops trying. It goes flat. It waits for the next call.
She survived it. The cancer went into remission. I got my green card in 2006. The years after gave me more. I was able to fly home. I sat in her kitchen. She made the curry chicken she had been making since I was a child, and she talked about the neighborhood and the new principal at her old school. As I ate her food, I did not tell her I had gone flat on the phone three years earlier because some things a son does not say to his mother even when they are true.
She lived more than a decade after the first cancer. She met people I had brought into my life; she saw more of what I had built. She died of a different cancer in 2019, not the one I am telling you about.
The flatness that came during her first cancer did not leave when she survived it. I want to be careful here.
I survived her first cancer because I could not picture losing her. The flatness was a mercy. It kept me working. It kept me from becoming the son who fell apart on an international phone call while his parents needed him to keep their one American investment alive.
The flatness did not leave when the danger passed. It stayed and has been here ever since. It became the response my body learned to give when news arrived that my mind could not convert into a picture.
I used to think I had been strong.
The son who worked through his mother’s cancer. The body that kept sending invoices, chasing contract renewals, and driving to offshore rigs while his mother was being operated on ten thousand miles away. The voice on the phone that did not crack.
I know now that I was not strong. I was not feeling anything. That is a different thing.
The twenty-five-year-old at the kitchen table could not picture losing his mother. He knew her voice. He knew her hands. He knew what she called him in different moods. He could not assemble the parts into a feeling.
Because he could not fear what was coming, the call did not break him. That is the mercy. You survive the moment because you cannot see it. The flatness is what lets you work. The flatness is what lets you sleep for four hours and wake up to answer emails at 6 a.m. on the morning after your mother has told you she does not know if the treatment is working.
Mercy has a price.
The unfeared moment does not leave. It waits inside you, whole. It sits there for years, untouched and unopposed. Eventually, when your life has moved into its later shape, and you have the quiet to feel things you had to refuse in their time, the fear arrives on delay. Fear for something that has already happened. Fear that cannot prevent anything because there is nothing left to prevent.
It’s the least useful kind.
News has come to me in my forties that I could not picture. A diagnosis. A prognosis. Numbers the doctors use when they want to be honest without being cruel.
The flatness arrives faster now. The body has been practicing for twenty-five years. A sentence lands. The picture will not form. The flatness covers the gap. The body drives home.
This is the inheritance of the son at the kitchen table. You train yourself through a thousand small unpicturings to survive by not seeing. And then the moment comes when seeing is the only thing that would serve you. When what is happening deserves to be seen, deserves your full fear, deserves the grief that has been waiting in you since 2003. The flatness arrives anyway because the flatness is what the body learned to produce.
I am forty-eight. I have been running this pattern for more than twenty years. I am only now beginning to understand that it was never the strength I thought it was. It was a kid’s way of surviving what he could not carry, and it worked. Yet, it has also cost me.
What I want now is the opposite of what the flatness gives.
I want to feel the full weight of what is happening. I want to be able to picture the years ahead well enough to be afraid of losing them. I want the imagination that would let me weep for what I have not yet lost.
This is not self-pity; it is the only way forward I can see. The unfeared moments have been stacking up inside me for two decades. The only way to stop the stacking is to let the next one in whole. To picture what I am being told. To be afraid when afraid is the right response. To believe, when belief would cost me something, that there is still something worth believing in.
Fear asks for imagination.
So does faith.
I am trying to learn both.
Until next week,
Eddie