The amber skyline inhales it’s last breath of light and exhales a nuclear ash glow into the expectant mouth of nightfall. One last gasp of light before the moon’s nefarious smile watches over the dark-side of Earth. Darkness so still and weightless is contrasted by a diligent symphony of tiny vampire insects that conduct an evening score with robotic transmission. Limbs moving fast and mechanically. Rhodopsin molecules regenerate and reconfigure in my retina as my vision adapts to the absence of light. Rods and cones realign; darkness fades to shades of grey. Shadows and highlights. Smoky wisps of just-snuffed candles dance with pleasure as the evil creatures of night emerge to lurk around in this dark underworld.
I sit alone on my parent’s deck in rural Maryland, eavesdropping on the screeching dialogue between cicadas that bounces erratically off the thick wet trees much like my mind does in this moment of reflection. Four years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer, but it honestly feels like 20 years ago. I have trouble remembering things coherently from that period in my life; I was barely present most of the time due to a shitload of legally prescribed drugs in addition to my overwhelming anxiety which hardboiled a shell around my brain like a protective fence to keep all records of my innermost horrors from wandering out and scaring the shit out of me. My brain still has trouble remembering what I did two days ago, and sometimes I actually have to think and count out how old I am. Recently, I accidentally ate a fucking dog tranquilizer pill instead of a Xanax on a 3-hour plane ride because my cognitive brain function gave up a long time ago so now my frayed synapses communicate by whistling between two tin cans connected by a string.
I still struggle every single day to reconcile with post-traumatic stress and I probably will the rest of my life. I’m not a role model, I’m a realist. I’ve learned to ignore the waves of sadness and fear for my future until they occasionally drown me and I have to come up for air and face them with a painfully ugly cry and a few days spent drinking wine in my pajamas at 3pm. Then I’m good for a month or two. Writing down my deepest fears is a cathartic thing that I sometimes do—when I first began typing them out I was sobbing in self-pity, but I’ve continued to address my fears until they become infinitesimal and somewhat comical.
Fear: I may never have children.
Me: But I’m children, so do I really have any business raising a child of my own?
I dive deep into these dim cavernous tunnels of panic and anxiety, lost in a maze of nothingness, and when I come back up to the surface it is always humor that saves me, and my mind that forsakes me. Like a werewolf anticipating the moonlight, these feelings creep inside my brain during the waning hours of evenings drowned in wine until the darkness of night infects my conscious like a spreading virus that consumes my thoughts like flesh in the teeth of monsters.
Why did I survive, what did I learn, why do I feel sad on a day when I should be grateful, what if I have cancer again right now in this moment, when are these feelings going to subside? I ask myself over and over ‘how did I get here’ to the point where no answer is the best answer and the question itself becomes white noise in my head like the muted woosh of a fan blade hoovering quietly on the ceiling.
But I am here. My changed appearance and mutated cells mirror the transformed person who occupies them. I am nothing like the person I was four years ago, and I am grateful. I see things differently, I think differently, I prioritize differently; with each passing year.
I have an unpublished journal entry from last year on my 3rd cancerversary and it reads like a different person wrote it. Who is that girl? I went through a phase where I hid my raw emotions in shopping bags or I buried them beneath the sand that I sat upon while drinking Modelo Lights and Instagramming pictures of myself or my scars with the ocean in the background just to show everybody how happy and carefree I was. I am still happy and quite carefree, but the difference now is that I don’t care who knows about it, and my most prominent cancer scars are the long, deep gashes into my psyche. And yeah it makes me feel really fucking stupid that four years later I still cannot fully grapple with the emotional side effects of one phone call from my doctor who nervously fumbled his words saying “Well, I don’t know how to tell you this. I was 99% sure that what I removed during surgery was not cancer, but the results came back positive. You have breast cancer.”
I can keep writing these same stories about how cancer changed me and I’m grateful; I’ll reword it using different metaphors and bullshit prose intended to stir emotion, but it’s not where I am right now. My life vacillates disproportionately between overzealous recklessness and flinching fear due to the ill-fated reality that I have a loaded gun named cancer pressed to my temple that begs to expel its willpower in a cruel game of Russian roulette. Everyone encourages me to write about cancer because I know how to write those “feel good” words that inspire people going through their own personal battles. My hope is that this different view of my story—the one where I’m more honest about my struggles—will help people just the same. I’m not a role model, but I want to be a testimony to living your life however the fuck you want, and that we should be talking about all of the good and bad feelings that come with it. So this is me: a dark, sulking, emo mess on my 4-year cancerversary. It’s my 4th birthday of feeling truly alive.