I Was Thirsty

I was thirsty. That’s how the rest of my life started, by being thirsty.

I was thirteen, and my family had just moved to Houston, we had been there for four months. Everything was going so well. Houston was a leap and a bound above the small refinery infested town we had just left in the Panhandle of TX; the middle of nowhere.

I have such a clear memory of standing in my room, the walls a blinding white, the sun setting beneath the large empty field that lay behind our house. I picked up a roller and pushed it through the soft blue liquid that pooled in the plastic tray. We painted my room blue that night. Blue like the thirteen year old me dreamed of flying in. I wanted to be a pilot. But that’s another story. Needless to say, I was an interesting 13 year old and if you don’t believe me when I say that, just take into consideration that JAG was my favorite TV show.

Anyway…so I was thirsty.

My feet thumped down the stairs as I took them almost two at a time. The late afternoon light flitted through every window. It was my parent’s 25^th wedding anniversary.

I heard the garage door go up, I knew my Dad was coming home. I popped open our old black lacquered fridge and took out a Diet Coke. I said “Hi” to my Dad who walked into the kitchen. My Mom was there also, the both of us standing around the bar of our kitchen island. I almost didn’t even believe the words that would come out of his mouth. “I have cancer,” is what he said. When he spoke those words, I could almost hear them crashing to the ground, I could almost feel the syllables falling. Suddenly the world was quiet and hollow and all that existed in that world were those three words.

Needless to say a conversation followed that utterance, but I can’t remember it. I only remember two other things from that day in May. I remember hearing my Mom crying at our dinette table, I remember taking my Walkman and putting the best CD I had into it and walking towards her. I remember putting the headphones on her and turning on the most comforting song I had. That’s one thing I remember from that day. The second thing I remember is going back into my room, shutting my bedroom door and opening my closet. I then proceeded to get into my closet and shut the door and cry for the better part of a night. I clutched my little red leather journal as I sat in that confined space but no words I could utter or write held any sort of consoling power. The click of the doorknob sounded foreign as I opened the door into my dark room. The gravity of the situation gathered around me, suffocated me, and clung to me like smoke. There was a noticeable shift in everything. Not like in everyday life where things evolve gradually. It was like an earthquake hit, it was like you could see the damage, you could feel it, you could breathe it in but could not breathe it out. Whoever I was before that day, I wasn’t that person anymore.

The worst part, the part that reached into my heart, the part that wrenched my soul the part that devastated any glimpse of hope I may have held was that this cancer, was incurable.

And I sat in my closet at 13, an only child, with next to no other family in Texas, my parents being my two best friends, and it felt like a great weight was now present in my chest. One that I’ve felt many times since then, one that I still feel. It’s a devastation that’s always there, lurking in the background, a darkness that acts as a shadow for now, but that at any given time can consume life as you know it. It’s still there.

How my Dad found out he had cancer was quite different from how I found out. He (from what he’s told me) was sitting out in a hall in MD Anderson, a hall, when they told him, on his 25^th wedding anniversary. That’s how he found out.

So here I am, 21, writing this blog, eight years later. And in recounting all of this it’s difficult to remember life before this event. I mean, I can remember life before May 2002, but it feels like someone else’s sometimes.

In some distant haze, like in a dream, I can see Denver, I can see Pennsylvania, I can see Borger (although I’d like to forget that one). And when I look into the future I am afraid. There is a darkness that lurks there, a possibility of being shattered. There are times when I feel like a delicate glass ornament, held up at a great height by a decaying string.

And today the battle is still being fought. There is so much (well, eight years worth) I’ve left out of this…note. This ‘note’ isn’t about the whole event. It’s just about the beginning of it. It’s all that I can manage in one day. So that’s what happened in May of 2002.

All he wanted was a nice 25^th wedding anniversary, and all I wanted was a Diet Coke, because I was thirsty.