The sliding doors know me now.
They open before I reach them—
a mouth saying
you’re here again,
you’re here again.

The chair receives me like a fact.
The needle searches for a way in—
veins worn, reluctant,
no longer reliable.
Sometimes the PICC team,
the practiced hands,
finding what remains.

This is the body’s loyalty:
to keep arriving.

To keep saying here I am
to rooms holding the silence
of everyone who waited here before me.

There is a version of courage—
the coat-on, door-locked,
car-started kind;
the showing up
when showing up
costs everything.

The wound is not only in the body.
It lives in the parking lot,
in the named file folder,
in the way summer looks different now—
more itself,
almost unbearably bright.

And still: arriving, arriving, arriving.
Month after month,
the doors part
as if they are glad—
as if the world, still,
wants to let me in.

Dennis Freire has Stage IV cancer and participates in a Phase 3 clinical trial requiring monthly tests at Huntsman Cancer Institute. Freire’s prose piece “A Quiet Kind of Guts” was published by Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine. He attends Huntsman’s Wellness and Integrative Health Center’s medical writing and literature programs led by its writer-in-residence Susan Samples.

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