Need to Begin

I wrote this three days before I was scheduled to have both of my breasts removed. I had just found out I had breast cancer September 4th, 2009.

26 September 2009

            I heard a song. I’ve heard it resonating.  “The fiction in the space between that has created space between you and me”. My head is filled with the stories of Calliope and Rhan Amir.  Instead of conversation I throw myself forward without hesitation into the lives of others.  I let these strangers absorb me mentally and emotionally.  Only these fictional characters and myself will ever know how I feel when their parents don’t listen to them or when promises are made that cannot ever come true.  I let my doubts fall into their hands.  My life cannot be said in a sentence.  You will never say, Lauren she is (fill in your desired occupation).  I am none of the above.  I do not struggle, but I get by.  I hope for facts.  I hope.  I hope and hope and hope. What is to come of hoping?  Just the bottom result.  I don’t have the drive to ever attend college.  My inward drive lets me bore endlessly of my daytime job.  I never feel that I could ever be loved.  Sure, there is a man in my life.  I talk that we are there for each other.  We both feel we have found the one.  Yet when he doesn’t call I am thrown into a torment I wouldn’t wish on someone I call my enemy. A castaway.  I love you. Do you love me? I love you, if this is what “love” is.  This is Lauren McClure. A rush of doubt, hesitation, and absolute unknowing.

       What I want is to walk to the kitchen and grab a Budweiser from the refrigerator and drink it until I fall asleep.  I know I need to get up in the morning and my judgment is taking the better of me.  My hands feel old.  I’ve told my story too many times over.  Can I please have a break? I am no longer myself.  Instead I am the face of breast cancer.  I feel like a walking pink ribbon.  What’s your survivor story? Were you sad, do you feel like less of women?  I feel like I am sick of this.  I am tired.  I want to be normal again.  I will never be looked at as a person again, but a disease.  I am breast cancer.  That is who I am.  Forever people will think of me as the twenty-two year old who had breast cancer.  Why didn’t I decide to be the twenty-two year old graduating from college? Do you think if I chose that route things would be different? That god really didn’t know what else to do with my life so decided to give me this disease to see how I would pan out. Questions. Too many.  I am suddenly old. Too old.  Too sudden.