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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3 comments:
please don't ever stop writing. i alwaYS get excited when i see you've posted a new one!
Kaylin-
I just found your blog through another YA cancer blog. You are a fantastic writer and I love your honesty/gutsy insight into the cancer experience. I, too, was diagnosed at 23 can relate to your story on many levels. I'm adding your blog to my blogroll...www.howyoulive.org.
I hope that you are finding a little joy everyday and not completely beat down by the cancer beast. Now that I know you (through the world wide web), you are in my thoughts and prayers. Looking forward to following your progress!
Best-
Sarah Conley
Hello,
You never met me, and I am reading through you blog posts four years after your death. I know the fear you're talking about, of being forgotten, having been cut out of the world and being nothing more than dusty remains where memories used to be. But what I want to tell you is that you mattered. You were real. The things you said are still being read and felt YEARS later. Your highs and lows, your feelings, they were all real and somebody still cares. You existed. You existed.
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