- I got sick in 2003.
And as much as I tried,
illness was one relationship I could never manage to leave.
In spite of seeing every doctor in Colorado,
I could not divorce my body from its pain.
In 2010, I woke up in a scream that lasted eight months,
a charlie horse bucking through my blood.
I didn't believe I could live through it for half an hour.
Then half a year passed.
And it was still nowhere close to tamed.
I struggled to walk from my bed to the bathroom,
left my house for nothing but my shows
that I didn't just cancel.
What would have been healthy to cancel
was a side effect of both shame
and having been raised proudly working-class
by a father who hated having a heart attack
less than he hated having to call in sick because of it.
To make it through my tour,
I wore an eight-year-old's pink-sequin dance leotard
hidden beneath my clothes for every reading,
a makeshift compression suit to ease the pain,
bought at a dance store,
beside a venue on a night I knew
it would be as easy for me to stand up on stage
for 60 minutes
as it would be for me to win the Olympics.
Every week, a new doctor would ask my symptoms.
I'd always answer, "My blood feels like crushed glass."
I had no other way to explain it.
They had no idea what to do.
Once during a layover in Chicago,
my legs at that point atrophied to toothpicks,
it took me 90 minutes to walk from one gate to the next.
By the time I boarded, I felt so close to dead,
I was certain the plane would be my casket.
So right before takeoff, I lost it,
wailing like an ambulance in the aisle of United 685,
until the plane stopped on the runway
and turned around to usher me into the hands of medics.
Needless to say, it wasn't the sexiest moment of my life,
though I do believe those flight attendants
still dream about me.
I guarantee it's not because they think I'm freaky
in a good way.
Some months later, I finally got diagnosed
with chronic Lyme Disease,
started a pantry of meds and began improving.
But when I hit a roadblock in my healing,
I began a weekly treatment
where essentially they'd take out my blood, clean it
and put it back in.
During my first appointment, I almost vomited,
seeing that my blood was the color of tar
and a similar texture.
The doctor said it was common with the disease,
but it gave me the willies,
watching something come out of my veins
that looked like it had come from a gutter.
One week, noticing my blood had worsened,
after I'd gotten in an argument with a friend,
I became obsessed with what I might be able to do on my own
to turn my blood red.
Before every weekly appointment I'd experiment.
What happens to the color when I meditate?
What happens when I do yoga?
What happens if I put nothing in my body but seaweed,
dandelion leaves and juiced kale?
What happens if I bathe in salted crystals
while chanting into my root chakra
while breathing sage into the lungs
of a cloud shaped like Mother Mary
admitting some sexy devil swallowed her holy cherry.
Some of my experiments
actually helped brighten my blood a bit,
but not so much that I wasn't losing faith
and sunk by despair.
I spent an entire long weekend
doing nothing but drinking and fucking, mostly fucking,
a woman I'd adored for years,
but had only recently found the courage to ask out,
or ask in since I could still rarely go out.
She stayed with me for three days,
and I don't remember a minute
I didn't feel like a country farm boy
getting gratefully ruined in the bed of his daddy's truck.
My body, a graffitied confession booth
turned inside out for that woman's truth.
At one point, a pig walked over from the neighbor's field,
press his snout to the door and fogged up the glass,
watching us get dirty on a beanbag on the living room floor.
We stopped, of course, as soon as we saw the pig,
shooed the kinky angel back home and kept going.
Walking into my appointment on Monday morning,
I was so terrified of the dark I knew they'd find inside me.
I slammed my eyes shut
when the doctor slid the needle into my arm.
They were still shut
when he belted "Jesus Christ."
I opened my eyes, and my blood was so bright.
It was the color of pomegranate seeds, of wild strawberries,
of lady bugs in love.
It was the color of falling, autumn maple leaves;
the part of the sunset you cannot believe is real.
My blood was the color of the lipstick
she left on my collarbone,
the color of her fingernails dug into my hips,
the color of my blushing when she told me to feel her up,
and I accidentally started unbuttoning her pants.
Y'all, I did not have a clue
how I managed to live this many years
without knowing "feel me up" means "touch my boobs."
But I know it now. I know it now.
Just like I know my blood is red.
When it's red, at least partially because of love,
because of what holds me to the light,
what touches me to the core,
what shined me like a ruby and wore me around her neck.
You can die from a broken heart.
I've watched it happen.
I've watched someone's body
follow a loved one's body to the other side.
It was the hardest thing I ever witnessed in my life,
but it was the softest too.
One heart stopping to tell another heart,
I'm coming with you.
You can die from a broken heart.
But the opposite, the opposite is also true.
(audience cheering)
Thank you.