Return to Iowa
1
I’ve returned, after some years of traveling and some months of treatment, to a city that I’m hoping will silence the echoes of hospital alarms that ring in my head still, a city many want to escape. It is sort of cliché, this city, nestled deep in flyover country, the kind of place where people are infatuated with the idea of “getting out” and going “anywhere else,” greener grass. This place, to them, is a dead end. Nothing much really changes. Nothing big, anyway, or not enough. Some would call it quiet.
Nearly everyone I know who lives here is from here, or their family is, or they are otherwise rooted here in the heartland. I am not. I chose to leave my Colorado hometown for Iowa for a scholarship I couldn’t refuse at a small liberal arts college. I never imagined I’d stay after getting my degree, but after I graduated in 2020, I couldn’t think of anything else to do during Covid but keep tending bar at a local dive. I spent nearly a year serving mostly the same people mostly the same drinks and trying to hear what shots people were yelling at me to make over the din of the drunken crowd—concoctions with names like red-headed slut, tootsie pop, buttery nipple. They almost always offered to buy me one too, and I almost always let them; drinking so much and so often that I didn’t feel it until it was too late, until I came to in a place or a bed I shouldn’t have been in. I shook and stirred and poured and drank for nearly fourteen hours a day, six days a week.
In late 2021, countries in South America began tentatively opening their borders to travelers who had negative Covid tests in hand. A Spirit Airlines flight from Denver, where my parents lived, to Cartagena, Colombia was less than fifty dollars. I left with a backpack and basic Spanish skills and the tips I’d flirted for, scrubbed toilets for, and scraped congealed vomit off the floor for. I, like everyone else who leaves this kind of place, never thought I’d be back.
Now I am.
The place is largely the same, as promised. Of course, it has shifted a bit, some businesses have closed, others have opened, there are new housing developments, my friends have purchased homes and engagement rings. Still, I felt something settle in my gut the moment I saw the smoke from the Quaker Oats plant arising above the flat Midwestern plain during my drive from my parents’ house in Colorado. I knew that smoke. I knew the grainy, slightly sweet smell that floated in my cracked window, that hint of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries. Familiarity felt like quiet.
The physical place felt known to me, though the body that I occupied within it still did not. My body, never something I’ve been happy with, had failed me so unexpectedly and dramatically that I thought of it now as an entity separate from me, an unreliable thing that I was trapped within.
So, yes. I know this place. The city itself, the feeling of being stuck.
2
About half a year before doctors found evidence of my mutated cells, before the hospitals and the needles and all the blood, I hiked to Choquequirao, an Incan archaeological site nestled in the mountains of Peru, with a man I’d left once already and come back for. I wasn’t well. My lymph nodes were constantly swollen, I was quickly exhausted, and it seemed I was always battling some sort of infection, of the throat or ear or something else. But I was being cared for by someone who loved me, and most days I was able to function somewhat normally, so I didn’t think too much of it. I could live in some pain and discomfort if that meant I could stay where I was and with him.
My coming back to Peru was as sure a sign of love as I know how to give. I don’t often return—to places, to people—once I’ve gone.
(Iowa, I love you.)
I’d moved into his tiny apartment after a couple days of knowing him, when he reasoned there was no point in me paying for a bed in a hostel when I was spending every night in his. Suddenly, everything was something to be shared—we took turns biting out of mangoes, only ever bought one bottle of beer at a time so we could take sips from the same rim, and when I caved and purchased a touristy alpaca-patterned sweater, I got it in a size too big so he could wear it too. The women in the markets tittered when we strolled by them, when he’d pick out a yellow flower from one of their bouquets to give to me or tuck behind my ear.
“Tu esposa?” One woman asked him, eyes darting to our interlocked fingers.
“Aún no,” he said, and she shrieked and swatted him on the arm. I squeezed his hand. Not yet.
We spent the evening of New Year’s Eve, what I believed would be our last night together, holding hands and feeding one another green grapes and making wishes for the year to come.
“What did you wish for?” I asked after every grape.
“We are not supposed to say, señorita.”
Tell me anyway, I’d have said, if I was braver.
Months passed. I was in the western highlands of El Salvador when he messaged me and asked me to come back. One week later, he picked me up from the Cusco airport on his motorbike.
“Señorita,” he said, clutching my face with both hands, kissing my cheeks. “You’re here.”
“I am,” I said with a laugh.
“Tu estás un poco loco.” He helped me shrug off my backpack, then hugged me. My body knew his body, the width, the smell. Holding him again felt like an exhale.
I cupped my hand around the back of his head, threading my fingers into his hair. It was longer and curlier now, physical evidence of the time that had passed since I last touched him.
“Tú tambien!” I said.
“Sí, amor.” He handed me a helmet and I straddled the bike. “We are un poco loco together.”
We set off for Choquequirao and drove for days through the Sacred Valley, stopping often for empanadas or ice creams or just to walk and stretch our legs. We dropped his bike and most of our things off in Cachora and made the rest of the journey on foot, spooning together in tiny cots made for one in mountainside guesthouses throughout the chilly nights. When we reached the village at the top of the mountain near the site, we shed our bags and collapsed on the grass, warm from the sunlight, delighting in the feeling of the blades between our toes. He rubbed my feet and fell asleep holding my leg as I ran my fingers through his hair. He snored, as he always did, but softly, a nice noise, pleasant rumbling.
I love this man, I thought to myself then, so tenderly and nonchalantly that I knew it was true. I thought it again as we ate dinner across from one another that evening and he stole bites of my omelet, and again as I fell asleep on his chest that night. Sleeping, eating, the general upkeep of a body—those necessary tasks were suddenly transformed.
We spent most of the next day in Choquequirao by ourselves, laying in the dirt amongst the ancient stones, swatting flies and telling stories. He told me about his boyhood, where his first job was killing and preparing guinea pigs for cooking. “I can’t imagine you killing anything,” I said to him, stroking his hands, which were always so gentle with me.
“I always made it very quick,” he said, raising my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles. “I did not want any suffering.”
We stayed in a hut with a glass wall overlooking the peaks, which were such a lovely and hazy mix of blues and purples that they looked blurry, like watercolor. I squinted my eyes at them, trying to distinguish the mountain edges from the sky. As the sun set, we played the sapo game, a South American pastime in which you throw gold coins towards a board and try to get one of the coins to land in a brass frog’s open mouth. He mixed bottles of Cusqueña beer with Coca-Cola. We took turns sipping.
I scraped by with a win in our first game. “I thought you said you were good at this?” I teased as we gathered the coins.
“Ay!” he yelled, tackling me into the grass. He kissed my forehead. “You are so mean to me.”
“Only sometimes,” I said.
He wanted a rematch. On his third toss, the coin went down the frog’s throat. He whooped and picked me up and spun me around. “I’ve only done that once before!” He exclaimed. “You are good luck, amor.”
Me, good luck.
During all of this, all the giggling and the kissing and feeling so alive, within the spongy substance in my bones, something was going wrong. There were abnormal myeloblasts, lots of them, that were prohibiting the growth of healthy blood cells. These myeloblasts, if left unaddressed for much longer, would take over and leave my blood empty of anything useful or good. A body cannot survive without healthy blood. Everything within a body relies on the blood.
I had no idea. Of course I didn’t. I was young and in love and it never occurred to me to think of dying at all, let alone to consider the possibility that I could, that I was.
The stars were plentiful that night, glittering outside the window of our hut. “You could stay here,” he whispered, his mouth against the back of my neck. “With me.” I really considered it, then. I knew, deep within my infiltrated marrow, that I really could be the kind of person to abandon an old life and trade it in for a new one in a new place. I’d done it before—I’d left Colorado, then Iowa, even though I’d built a life for myself in both. I felt, with the arms of someone I loved wrapped around me and my muscles aching from climbing mountains up to a beautiful hidden place, like I could do pretty much anything, so why not this, forever?
When I told him, much later, that I wasn’t going to stay, I said it in English. I didn’t want to break his heart in his language, in the language we always used to speak of love. So much of the Spanish I know is sweet nothings. I respond, still, to the word amor as if it is my name.
He took a shaky breath. His eyes squeezed shut, but a few teardrops fell anyway. I tried to wipe them away, but he grabbed my hand as I reached for him and brought it to his mouth, kissing each of my knuckles twice.
“I know,” he said.
A few days after that, I got on another plane.
Sometimes I imagine that I never left, that I am still there, climbing up mountains and drinking milky coffee and throwing coins at brass frogs, healthy and unincumbered and forever in the ephemeral moment before the collapse. I wonder if he ever finds long yellow hairs in his zippers, evidence of a body I no longer have, remnants of what I’ve lost. When I miss him, I miss myself too.
3
Perhaps I’ve returned to Iowa because it is where I am most known, and I want the people who know me to assure me that I am the same person, even with everything that’s changed. When people come into the bar I work in now and recognize me from years ago, I feel a kind of settling, the same peace I’d get when I finally spotted a familiar landmark while wandering lost through unfamiliar streets with a dead phone and a horrible sense of direction.
“Oh, hey, it’s you!” They say, and I smile back and ask all the questions they expect of me, like “How have you been?” and “What are you drinking?”
Yes, I think, as I shake and stir and pour. It is me. They know who I am.
Many of them, kindly, ask about my health. “I feel great!” is usually my response, and this is mostly true. Then, as if they’ve all read the same script, they say, “Well, you look great!”
But do I look like me?
It seemed impossible to me during the months of treatment that my sick body would ever again look like anything other than a sick body, but here, in Iowa, after I put on my wig and hide the hairline with a baseball cap and cake some mascara on my still-growing eyelashes, it is recognizable as what it was before.
My body can, miraculously, do what it did before, too. I can stand and walk around for eight-hour shifts without getting tired, my mind is not too fuzzy to be quick-witted with guests, and, when I nicked my finger while cutting limes, it stopped bleeding after a few minutes. Just months ago, I had to sit in a chair in the shower because I couldn’t stand and rub a washcloth over my skin at the same time. Nurses wrapped a belt around my waist and held on to it every time I stood in case my body gave out, so they could catch me if I fell. My nose bled, often, for twelve or more hours because I had no platelets to make it stop. I reached in my throat, pinched the blood clots congealing there, and yanked them out, jiggly like the Jell-O they tried to make me eat and made of nothing useful, of cancerous cells.
But Iowa knows me as a young, energetic bartender, not as a cancer patient. Here, it is easier to pretend that I don’t know how quickly a body can deteriorate when things go wrong. Until I take my wig off, I can pretend that I am who I was. I can get close to forgetting, though forever close to, and not quite. Sometimes, when I am lucky, my mind quiets.
4
My Spanish was clumsy at best when I started traveling in Latin America, but the longer I stayed in Spanish-speaking countries, the better I got. I could get myself from place to place, buy bus tickets, order coffee and beer, say sin carne and sin pollo to maintain my vegetarianism. I was able to politely ask my mugger to not take my passport or my phone as I handed him all the cash I had, and I knew what people said about me when they thought I couldn’t understand them. In Peru, with him, I could ask for besos and say te amo, te quiero, te adoro, which felt like all I really needed to know.
In the hospital, the doctors were saying things like myeloblast and neutrophils and leukemia, which were not words I had a strong grasp of, and I felt my focus turn fuzzy, like it did when I took too long to translate Spanish in my head and the person speaking to me had already moved on. They were also saying things like cancer and survival and chemotherapy, and these were words I knew, but they were not words I ever thought I’d use in reference to me and my health, so they seemed foreign anyway. The doctors may have been speaking English, but this was not my native tongue.
They took some blood, which looked bad. They drilled into my bone multiple times, and the marrow they pulled out looked worse. There were so many words said to me during this time, but it didn’t really matter what language they were in. I didn’t understand any of them.
One of my family members or friends stayed overnight in the hospital when they could, but there were the occasional nights alone. On the first of these nights, as I lay in a room that somehow smelled simultaneously of bleach and something rotting and Field of Dreams played softly on the TV, I thought about how many others had been in the same bed. I’ve spent many nights sleeping on flimsy cots in cheap hostels around the world, so I was no stranger to being in beds with frequently changing occupants. In those places, as other travelers snored and coughed around me, I often wondered about the people who’d been in my bed before, what they were like and what they were doing now and what they’d been like when they, too, were nomadic and slept amongst strangers. In the hospital, I wondered how many of the people who had been in my bed before were dead now, how many had died from the same condition I had. I slept among ghosts—in a baseball field in Iowa, in my bed.
A few days after I got the diagnosis, a doctor asked me if I wanted to delay treatment to freeze my eggs. Chemotherapy would make me infertile, she explained, and extracting my eggs would be my only hope of having a biological child.
I thought of him then, how just months ago in some village in Peru, we’d been buying dried fruits and nuts when a young woman holding a little girl’s hand squeezed between us.
“You would be a wonderful mother,” he said, staring at them. The girl had pigtails that wobbled as she stumbled on her unsure feet.
“You think so?”
“Of course.”
“No one’s ever said that to me before,” I said. “I can’t really picture myself as a mom.”
“I can, amor. You would be perfect.”
I wrapped my arm around his waist and squeezed his hips into mine. “Would you ever want another kid?” I asked. He had a son from a previous relationship.
“Are you saying you want to make a baby with me?” He teased, turning his face so he could kiss my cheek.
I felt my face warm from my blush. “Do you ever think about that?” I asked, looking at my feet in my dusty Birkenstocks, at my chipped toenail polish.
“I do,” he said. “I picture us having a little girl, with your hair and my skin. She could speak perfect Spanish and perfect English. We’d raise her to be just like you.”
“You want another me?”
“I want a thousand yous!”
So, then, there wouldn’t be a thousand mes, or three, or even just another one. My body would never be anyone else’s home. There would always be only me here, and with the way things were going, maybe not for much longer.
“I don’t want to delay treatment,” I said. The image of a little girl with blonde hair and tan skin flitted briefly in my mind, and then she was gone.
Ever efficient, the oncologist was saying even more words to me, things like cytarabine and daunorubicin.
“Am I dying?” I interrupted.
“Oh,” she said, her face briefly flickering from its professional blank slate. “I promise you we are going to do absolutely everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
I nodded. “I know,” I said. “And I appreciate that. But right now, with the leukemia, am I dying? Like if we didn’t do anything and I just went home, would I die?”
I imagined doing this—telling the many doctors thanks but no thanks, packing up my things, removing the hospital gown, and walking down to the lobby I’d never seen because I’d come through the ambulance entry in the back on a stretcher. I pictured myself going home to my parents’ house, tucked in the trees, and going to bed and not waking up. I wondered which of my parents would find me dead.
The doctor’s eyes flickered with concern. “If you’re feeling suicidal, we have plenty of…”
“No, no. I’m not suicidal. I just…” I swallowed. “I’ve been feeling like I’m dying for weeks, and for weeks I’ve told myself that I was being crazy or weak and it’s been…a lot. I don’t know if I’m crazy or not.”
We stared at each other. The room was silent except for the dripping of some fluid in one of the many bags hanging from the IV pole, which contained many tubes, some of which were attached to one of the lumens dangling from the catheter in my arm. There was always so much in the hospital, always so many things going into my veins.
“Yes,” she whispered, finally. She cleared her throat and spoke louder. “Yes. I am hopeful that the treatments will stop the spread of cancerous cells, and your prognosis is generally positive because of your youth and your health otherwise, but right now, in this moment, you are dying. If we didn’t do anything, you would die.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You are not crazy.”
“Okay,” I said again. I understood those words. I clung to them.
She nodded.
Maybe I’ve returned to Iowa all these months later because it’s the last place I truly lived before I was sick. I’ve only stayed in places since I left; my existence within them always temporary. Before, in Iowa, I had a key to an apartment that was half mine, I had more than just a backpack’s worth of clothes, I had some pieces of furniture. I had a job and friends and boyfriends. If I hadn’t been one of the many desperate to leave, if I’d made different choices, I could’ve been part of a community here, maybe gotten married, maybe had children.
I’ve never been in Iowa and been dying. Maybe that’s all this is.
5
The city I’ve returned to is approximately 57 miles from the real-life Field of Dreams. During my third round of chemotherapy, I watched the movie again on a night my nurse was being stingy with the Melatonin and the beeping was too loud and the lights in the hallway were too bright and my head was too cold without any hair on it. In one scene, a ghost is standing in a baseball diamond in a cornfield and asks, “Is this Heaven?”
The protagonist replies, “It’s Iowa.”
Sometimes, I feel like the treatments didn’t really work and the cancer killed me. My body is untrustworthy, so I can’t bring myself to wholeheartedly believe anything it does, including heal. Why would I survive when so many with my condition don’t? My existence now is one in which my body’s cells have spontaneously and dangerously mutated, and it is highly likely that they will again. Nothing feels certain anymore. All of this roars in my head; I want, for the first time, a quiet life.
So, maybe that’s why I came back. Because sometimes I think I’m dead, and I want to be in Heaven. I got close.
