Dear Cancer

The moment I realized I was more afraid

of living than I was of dying

was the moment they found the reason

I'd been sick for years

What happens when a dying girl

Can't escape life

Life has tried to kill me

A thousand, a thousand times

Sometimes I don't know why

Something inside of me persists to live

But every time I face mortality it's there

Maybe it's to finally give myself a life

That I'm not afraid to live

Or maybe I'm just too stubborn

To go out without it on my own terms

I don't know why I won't die

Surviving cancer gave me yet

Another second chance at life

So why do I feel so purposeless?

And why do I feel so numb?

And why do I succumb to this malaise

A malady of my soul

Dear Cancer,

You took my life,

You spit it out

I'm living with this wreckage

I survived

So,

Why do I feel like I'm living a lie?

Why do I feel so calm,

Yet so perpetually terrified?

I hear these stories of lives changed

The day they hear the cancer went away

So why do I feel like it's a crime for me to say,

My life had more meaning when I was fighting you

I felt like I had a say

Now I'm climbing through this wreckage

I don't even know WHAT to say

Just that I'm so sick of everything

Everything thing that you left me with

Because you didn't take my life away

Doctors can't treat this pain

I do everything I can

Every Goddamn day

Yet still I am a shell of this person I was

The entire time I was fighting you

I left my addictions behind

The pain doesn't care

It hurts to exist

And it comes out of nowhere

One day I am fine and building my life

The next I'm crying

Watching it, utterly destroyed

The doctors say that you are gone

But you come like a thief in the night

Destroying everything I just built

Like a castle in the sand

Ten steps forward

Fifteen steps back

How can anyone live a life

Under constant attack

Author's Note

I fought my battle with cancer for the first 5 years of it, alone, with everyone judging me. Not knowing I had cancer. My fight with cancer taught me self-reliance, emotional independence, it brought my relationship with death and fear to the surface. Stay strong cancer survivors, no one tells you how to live after you survive this shit, you travel a road with no direction. Have faith in yourself, and what you believe in, and you will find a way to get your life back someday.