Between Two Kingdoms

Part 2 brings the present tense into the narrative, introducing an active and in-progress tone. The present tense also signals a new stage in Suleika’s illness and view of herself. She considers what it means to be neither fully well nor fully sick, and how one can live between the two. Suleika begins Chapter 25, “The In-Between Place,” with a quote from Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor. Jaouad writes, “I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live” (211). Sontag’s words and Jaouad’s reflection recall Part 1’s many in-betweens: countries, languages, relationships, mortality, and illness, and they ground the next part of the book regarding how Suleika chooses to live into her future: how will she enter the “kingdom of the well” (200)?

Chapter 25 begins with an anticipatory and hopeful tone and notes Suleika’s summer is marked by newness. Jaouad marks her newness not only in tone but through scenes where she goes out to meet friends. Suleika’s outing with Jon takes an unexpected turn, but she still practices avoidance in many ways, unaware of how much grief she carries from the last few years. When she shrugs off Jon’s comment about Will and her being “so solid,” she also metaphorically brushes off the uncertainty she still faces with illness and her body.

Suleika tries convincing herself that she is okay after the breakup with Will and inside her body, but her inattention is costly. She writes, “My mind will do anything to avoid a reckoning—it confuses and contradicts itself until I can no longer distinguish what is real from what is not; it convinces me that I'm fine when in fact I couldn’t be further from it” (203).

While Suleika avoids her feelings about Melissa’s death and her breakup, depression and anxiety grip her for weeks at a time. Jaouad acknowledges how her intimacy with Jon heightens her awareness of changes in her body after chemotherapy. Their closeness unmasks her pain and scars, which she didn’t have to explain to Will: “It was one thing to be intimate with Will, who witnessed my body undergo the metamorphosis of illness; it is another thing entirely to be intimate with an outsider, a civilian. As we undress, I feel exposed and insecure” (204). Because she is not yet engaging and processing her emotions and recent pain, she feels like an imposter in her relationship with Jon and her writing.

When Suleika has surgery to remove her port, a sadness wells up in her that she can’t explain. When she cries later that evening, Jaouad notes that the tears come from the knowledge that she will not see nurse and doctor friends routinely and will lose the life of treatment that she had grown accustomed to: “The sadness is the start of something too complex and discomfiting for me to parse quite yet” (210). Suleika wants to be done with cancer, but the transition into health and the outcomes from her treatment are uncertain over the long term.

When Suleika tells Will about Jon, she feels nauseated by the hurt she causes him but also gratified by it, to know he might still care. The paradox of love and hate characterizes their relationship. Jaouad notes that neither of them can see past the hurt that they have inflicted on each other, and the relationship troubles reverberate in the binary pattern of language. A few weeks later Will says he needs to move on, Suleika’s obsession with this phrase resonates with the significance of movement in the book and how she will find her healing in the coming chapters.

India is a respite from Suleika’s pain because she volunteers and attempts to find peace with Melissa’s death by returning Melissa’s ashes to a place that was meaningful to her. Even as India and her friend’s memory soothes her, she opens herself to an array of feelings including fear, uncertainty, and joy. Jaouad writes, “I’m beginning to understand that no matter how much time passes, my body may never fully recover to what it once was—I can’t keep waiting until I’m ‘well enough’ to start living again” (217). Going to India doesn’t make the pain go away, but the trip shows Suleika that she can begin to open herself to grief and take risks again. In the same chapter, “Rites of Passage,” Suleika learns to drive. Through driving, she achieves a milestone that she missed as a teenager and moves closer to her goal of going on a road trip. Driving represents personal agency, and in Chapter 28, Suleika uses driving to begin to process her feelings and experiences. For the first time, she cries for Melissa. Suleika travels emotional distances in herself and physical distances to make amends. She travels to see her parents, from whom she has been distant. By driving to visit them, she shows a willingness to love them despite their differences. Their desire to call and wish her well is an action-oriented reconciliation.

Suleika plans her road trip based on letters she received from readers of her column. These letters symbolize connection and sustenance. The connections form the basis for her new 100-day project, the road trip, which represents an effort to reconnect with herself in the new territory she inhabits. The 100-day timeline corresponds to the previous projects: journaling and the blood marrow transplant. Each one of these projects integrated disparate or foreign parts into a new, cohesive whole. The road trip, Suleika hopes, will provide the same reconnecting.

Suleika begins her trip and learns from Ned that reentry into the kingdom of the well is ongoing and difficult. Ned believes he will never fully arrive in that land. He talks about himself in three distinct parts, and Suleika realizes that she describes herself in the same way. Her self-confidence and sense of adventure build as she talks with and visits Ned. Ned transmutes his suffering into language, and words become a symbol of survival and represent an enduring self through each stage of illness and healing. Traveling, though empowering, also reminds Suleika how vulnerable and scared she feels of strangers, but she sees too how she misjudges others. Suleika’s awareness is another signal of how difficult it is to relinquish fear and open oneself to conversation and discovery on the road.