People often ask me if having cancer is a surreal experience. Can you imagine only having a year or two to live? Neither can I. I usually say that I've acclimated by now and grown accustomed to the "realness" of my situation. When I awoke today in my beloved apartment for the last time, third story sun shining through my big victorian windows, everything felt like another dimension. In a way, it was- I was waking up to my past. The life I lead before cancer is history, and I'm having a hard time letting go. I want to hold on with white-knuckled desperation because at 23 I was finally coming into my own, for the first time in my life. There was an inclination of something monumental just upon the horizon, and I was right, though it was not what I had expected. Because of this I've started to ruminate on fate, or purpose, or whatever you'd like to call it. I felt cancer coming intuitively, and now I believe it is a roadblock I am meant to overcome. My fate has more glorious and catastrophic things in store.
now you see it
now you don't.
Moving day is today. I've always loved the idea of leaving things behind to be found in old houses. I want to find something or leave something- little pieces of the past, a sentence to a story you'll never know. The idea of a legacy left behind, even to a stranger. Other people's lives fascinate me. I always thought I'd have a child eventually, and I could leave all my writings and odd things behind to be passed down. I'd be someone's crazy great-great-great grandmother that left all of her love-letters and ramblings. Now I'm faced with the very real possibility that this won't happen, that I'll die prematurely in some hospital bed and slowly be forgotten. My story will rot in a box somewhere, just as I will. Perhaps the only way for me to move on from this is to leave a part of me behind.
I need to pry up some floorboards and get to it.
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