All Right

By: Gabriela Yareliz

“You’re all right, now,” my friend’s text message read after I told her about my morning. “Go home and have a good cry.” I couldn’t. I needed to go to work. Weirdly, I didn’t feel like crying to release all the tension that had built up in me. I also didn’t feel rejoicing was completely appropriate. What could have been happens to people every day. What I felt was a relief and gratitude. Heavy gratitude. Gratitude that weighed more than the tension I had carried up until now.

I started out the year at one of NYC’s top hospital cancer centers for an evaluation. I walked in like a zombie, passing sympathetic and worried faces, glassy room dividers and large vases. Twinkling lights remained from the holiday season, reminding me that tomorrow is Three Kings Day.

There is nothing like a little uncertainty to make one reflect deeper on life, one’s fears, and one’s desires. It reminds one to take nothing for granted; to love, and love well.

Uncertainty surrounds us. The new year is uncertain– each new day is uncertain. Someone once said that all we can do is trust an uncertain future to a certain God.

Each day brings its own turmoil and stress. Its own victory and/or defeat.

I was on the train this morning, and I was reading my magazine. Magazines have always been such a source of comfort for me, since childhood. Maybe that is why I enjoyed studying journalism so much. I read some words that touched me deeply:

“Look to the star, keep spirits high. Good times are coming by and by.
Do not let yourselves get down;
Faith’s more a verb than it’s a noun.”

Ian Frazier, New Yorker, Issue: Dec. 19 & 26, 2016, pg. 91

Maybe, I am not “all right” now that I know. Maybe, I was all right all along, and I will be all right, no matter what. Maybe, life is about learning just that.

Toodles for now.
The Forever Student