Sometimes I imagine the cancer spreading within me. My loosened skin as its boundaries. I stole the same image from a storm I watched last May. Darkness overtaking the bluest of skies. For a while they seemed harmonious. Like the conjunction of lovers, long apart, retracing their paths to the open arms of the other. The billowy edges of the first and largest black cloud curled over the sun, a thick fleeced blanket devising the world from the universe. I remember its anger and thought myself ridiculous to believe in some sort of partnership with such opposite things when tears so quickly fell from the sky.
Now I sit in this ****-stained seat within an oxymoronic room of sterilized air and droning walls. I pretend that I can feel the edges of the malignant monster inside of me, consuming my material under its trembling lip, angry and cold. Sitting, the cancer was waiting to lower me into the earth in triumph for its return.
I used to be afraid. Like the first time I knew I was alive, for sure.