Forget

There are some things you never forget. Contest entry.

It stared as a lump on my head. Just one of those funny bumps you sometimes get. I thought it was a cyst. One of those annoying things you try to poke but won’t deflate until they’re good and ready. So I left it.
I left it for a year.
Oh sure, I got embarrassed by it. But it sat under my hairline so most of the time I could just forget about it. It wasn’t until I scraped my hair back into a ponytail for work that I saw it glaring at me, red and angry. I put my hat over it and forgot about it again.

Once in a blue moon someone would smack it during my martial arts' class. It would burn like nothing else for a few moments and then it was gone. And I forgot.

That’s kind of my gift really. The ability to forget. People could tell me their deepest darkest secrets and by the next day it was gone. Hidden in the dark recesses of my mind.

So I forgot. I forgot so long it took a new lover constant prodding for me to go get it checked. I assumed it was a cyst and was ready for the doctor to send me away like so many times before. Instead she sent me immediately to the skin cancer clinic.

I dismissed it as routine. Send the girl to the specialist just in case. So I forgot about it some more. A month later I turned up at the skin cancer clinic thinking I’d just pop in and out and get back to work.

One glance at my head and the man knew it was skin cancer. I was young, but I wasn’t the youngest, he said. Part of me felt cheated, like if I had to bear this mantle then I could at least be the youngest. Then the realization set in.

I had cancer.

I was twenty-four, with no health insurance, and I had cancer.

I panicked. I tried to keep it together but I broke down in tears. My world shattered like a glass slipper tossed over the edge of a skyscraper.

I couldn’t go back to work. I couldn’t even stop crying. I just drove, blind and racked with sobs down empty streets as I tried desperately to return to my source of comfort.
My boyfriend was waiting for me when I got home. He pulled me into a tight embrace and like magic the tears that had seemed unstoppable dried up.
He was my rock during those times. He took me back to get a biopsy, talked me through the diagnosis and walked with me to the specialist. All the while the calm he exuded soothed me without him every saying a word.
And then the specialist spoke. He spoke so cheerfully and casually about it all that I felt my spirits lift. You’re young to have this, he said. You’re skin’s a bit tight so we’ll cut out this and then we can move the skin from to here to the front. We won’t even have to shave your hair.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Not only was the man completely confident in his ability to remove it but he was also going to leave me looking completely normal. The man was magical. There was no other word for it.
I still have the surgery awaiting me, but compared to everything I heard and read and imagined, my world is looking brighter than ever before. I can look at the world though rose-coloured glasses again and see that shimmer of fairy dust across this once dystopian world.
I forget a lot of things. It's kind of my gift. But this I will not forget. Not for as long as I live.

Author's Note

Using the words 'fairy dust', 'glass slipper' and 'magic'.

Reviews

[Ben Noah Suri]

I hope this is not a true story. If true the lady is lucky that nothing major or untoward happened. Your story telling skills are excellent for you could keep an easily distracted guy like me reading till the end

[ElizabethAmBurns]

Thank you, unfortunately it is true, but it had a happy ending! I'm blissfully cancer-free going on two years now. :)

[Samuel Dickens]

Excellent writing. This is fiction? If so, you sure could've fooled me.
An error here--"looking brighter than every before." I think you meant "ever before"

[ElizabethAmBurns]

Thankyou, I missed that typo. Unfortunately it is not fiction, but the truth wrapped up in a neat bundle, dipped in dramatics, sprinkled with similes, and a moral on top. It's just a story that that got dragged out by the key words of a contest and demanded to be told right then and there.

[Samuel Dickens]

I see. Well, I'm sure glad things turned out so well for you.