My friend has stage four Hodgkin’s Lymphoma
and is barely three decades old.
He is part of my generation.
He updates everybody about his cancer
on Facebook.
He posts pictures on his blog
of the sterile beige plastic machines
that take pictures of him
and scorch his insides with radiation
and burn all but the strongest of his cells
with chemotherapy.
I haven’t actually heard his voice in eight years
but it was just nine years ago
that he and I both sat in a booth in a dirty Greek restaurant
in Downers Grove, Illinois, just off of Ogden Avenue,
and smoked cigarette after cigarette
and talked about god knows what—
stupid shit, probably. Shit that only young, invincible people
would concern themselves with.
The truth is, I don’t know what we’d talk about if I saw him today.
Maybe we’d talk about how he is dying of cancer
and I am not, in spite of the fact
that I have smoked more than he has,
exercised less than he has,
eaten worse than he has,
and made all the wrong decisions,
while he’s made all the right ones.
We could talk about the cruel irony
or the cold indifference of life
or how plans never go according to plan,
but my guess is that he wouldn’t care.
He is in another place. A focused place:
He is in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs,
and is one run behind the opposition.
The treatments haven’t worked yet, but he knows the stakes of giving up.
“I am Kirk Gibson,” he writes to everybody online.
“I am Kirk Gibson.”