II. Papa Legba, An Epistle To Lwa

“Jete dlo oui nan lakou a Hey ho

Ha Legba nan lakou a hey

Rassemble oui nan lakou a Hey ho” — Boukman Eksperyans, “Legba”

“Disability theory, too, is coeval with the afterlife of [racial] slavery.” — Christina Vispaeras, “The Able-Bodied Slave”

A close-up of me.

Last Sunday, I was on my way back home from sitting in the park for an hour or so. I received a phone call from my primary care from Callen Lorde regarding the results from a brain MRI I had scheduled the week prior. She said the diagnosis was a ‘velum interpositum cyst.’ Without any knowledge of what these words meant, I assumed the worst. Hastily trying to put words together, I asked what that meant. Most of all she could say was that there was a large cyst in my brain and gave me a referral to see a neurosurgeon. She said to try not to overworry as the weekend arrived. Still I worried. Shit, I worry now.

I cried as I needed to but only for about twenty to thirty minutes of that day. I always feel I don’t cry enough, but at the same time — for some reason, I feel like I can’t will myself to cry.

I listened to music to catharthically push what I could no longer say or ponder about vicariously through the lyrics and melodies of Capital STEEZ’s “Infinity and Beyond,” Keyshia Cole’s “Heaven Sent,” 2Pac’s “Thugz Mansion (Acoustic Version),” and T.I.’s “Live In The Sky.” The songs — the music, is not always the same. And it’s not just the music; it’s the summation of the instrumentality, the where I am now and where I feel the sound is taking me in the moment(s) — from a vaguely warm nothingness to an acceptable breeze where if I could ever find a moment to be calm, I’m staring out into an ocean — listening to the tides brush back and forth in spite of the fact that I can’t swim. It’s a synesthesia of sorts.

My hypochondriactical impulses always give me more to think about than what I’m faced with. I did suspect that this cyst was connected to the cluster headaches I experienced late last year and in 2024 — both of which seemed to have been triggered by similar factors — a leading factor being obstructive sleep apnea. I neglected to have a brain MRI done subsequently during the first wave of cluster headaches that occurred. At the time I explained this to my former primary care doctor from the Institute for Family Health of Harlem, his speculation was along the lines of, “sometimes the brain misfires.” It’s a rare neuropsychological condition for which palliative care seems to be the only method to lessening the pain — not getting to its epistemological root causes. He prescribed me sumatriptan, an over-the-counter medication to mitigate the cluster attacks. More or less, I didn’t feel they were effective.

Sometime before the headaches went into remission, I brought this up to a colleague and former friend of mine. They proposed I substitute sumatriptan with topamax, which unlike sumatriptan, prevents migraines as opposed to mitigating the pain that a headache is already causing. Sometime after the headaches went into remission, ironically, it was my hypochondria, strangely enough, that piqued my curiosity to know and understand these triggers — from the right side of my face being in unbearable pain, my right eye tearing up, my nose being congested, sunlight, strong smells, and that these clusters occurred at a specific time every day (sometimes at random times of the day). Unlike tension, migraine, sinus, exertion, PTSD headaches, clusters would rise and subside, but the pain would be minute; they remain until the next day. The next clusters would rise for the next few hours. I had no idea that these headaches were in a category of their own.

In view of the information I’ve gathered about this velum interpositum cyst, nonetheless, I would hope it’s not cancerous. Even if it’s not life threatening, I wouldn’t put it past me that it could kill me. Have you ever received devastating news and in an act of desperation, turned to text everyone you knew? From relatives, chosen friends, to venting channels in Discord servers and the like, not expecting reprieve, but a modicum of reassurance, even if they knew nothing of what you were talking about? Moments before I pressed the button on the elevator door, I saw one of my downstairs neighbors. He went by Tony, a cishet Black man who had to have been in his 50s. He was one of the only other people I met in this apartment since I first spoke to him months ago. I felt obliged enough to check in and open up about my recent diagnosis from my doctor.

“I have a large cyst in my brain,” I said.

“I do too. Mine is in the back of my head.” He explained.

“Holy shit.” I thought to myself.

He described surgical procedures he underwent for his eyes. For the life of me I can’t recall most of this exchange, but I remember him saying that during one of those operations, he could’ve permanently lost one of his eyes or died. Immediately our entire conversation brought to mind Saidiya Hartman’s texts, Lose Your Mother:A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and the opening section of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America respectively. What has grounded me was knowing that I had certain epistemological tools at my disposal with which I can move through the plantation-as-world. As Tony and I spoke, it made me think more about this ‘newness’ of age I’ve reached.

The fact that I’ll be 35 this November and my body hurts now and this pandemic continues to chip away at what remains fragmentations of my memory, I also thought, I don’t know that I want to find out that I no longer have the capacity to do what I can to support myself any more than I do now. Papa Legba, is this where I come to grips not only with what impermanence means in the act of transitioning to the afterlife, but also gradually developing a broad understanding about the dimensions of what impermanence means? In other words, what does lifelessness mean when the body is not just fatigued, but when it feels as though it is on the verge of collapse?

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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.