You’ve read the words a million times
Seen it from novel to novel
You read about the daughters
And those they love
The ones who got sick
They hope
And hope and hope
then things go bad
And the only one who can still hope are the daughters
I’ve read their words from all across the decades
Sympathized with their pain
With their grief
With their internal struggles
But I never empathized with them
And in the past
I had this thought
In my head like a sticky note adhered to the fridge
Stuck there right next to the grocery list and the kindergarten artwork
It read
I would never be a daughter

Then the words leapt off the pages
Of the hundreds of novels
Inserted themselves into my narrative
Gluing themselves to my skin,
I tried to rip them off myself
But they peeled off my skin with their literary fingers
Taking some of my skin with them as they launched and
Ripped the sticky note off my cerebral refrigerator
I became a daughter

Sometimes I still can’t believe that word is a part of my life now
Cancer
And I understand what these daughters have felt
That it feels wrong that I should be the one feeling hurt
It is those I love that are sick and I am healthy with no physical ailment on me
No tumors or scars under my skin
But I feel as if they are in my heart
There is a tumor there and it won’t be removed
Because how could one ever remove a metaphorical tumor
Why does it hurt?
Is it because of the chemo
Cherishing the Hope that Everyone is Mostly Optimistic
Devoting myself to keeping everyone else in balance
Holding the weight of the world even though I could easily just let it go and crush
Every horrible thing in this life
But it became a part of me when that word entered my life
I can’t make it separate, make it leave, can’t stop being who I was born to be
Someone to hold the weight
Except one
One weight that ain’t no metaphorical tumor

The person I love is sick
The novels have inserted their words into my narrative
I just hope I can revise their endings
And move cancer into the index
The credits
anything
instead of having  the last page read
the end

But, then I see the one I love stand strong
As everyone says this is the end
She won’t pretend that this it
Because it isn’t
She takes the pen into her own hand and erased what the world had written
And writes the end of part one
The end to this chapter in a long happy saga called
life
And she writes to the daughter
I'll see again
when you finish part one
In your wonderful fairy tale book