The Pale Girl

My tumor’s heart is dead fluid, making it a different shape to most. This means it can only be treated with surgery, not radiation.


A part of me almost likes this horrible fact, that it’s liquid not solid, dead not living. Aggressively expanding in a way the living, circular little ones don’t.


I am the rarest of a rare kind. It is a horrible horrible miracle that this pale girl in me lives at all.


I am Schroedinger’s writer. Whether I live or die, this story exists on the razor-thin line between the possibilities. Whichever happens will cast its shadow backwards, of course. Such is the nature of the past as seen from the present.


When Mary Borsellino discovered she had a brain tumor, she coped with it the only way she knew how: by writing about it. And New Zealand. And the Antichrist. And dating sim video games. As one does.


I left a piece of my heart behind in that day. I wish I could go back to it now, and live in it, static, forever and ever.


But time and life don’t work like that. We leave pieces of our hearts behind in the memories of the good days, but we can’t go back. Only forward, into the dark.