Incurable?

By now you know I am someone who overthinks every step. I like to walk the twenty minutes from my house into the village where I live. One day walking home I noticed that the word c**t had been carved in giant letters into the concrete path just outside the village centre. Someone was obviously in the right place at the right time when the concrete was still soft enough to allow the artist to engrave something that would be immortalized for years to come. Instead of choosing a quote, a greeting or even an expression of love, our genius decided to etch into the concrete a vulgar obscenity. I’ve walked over it dozens of times and it creates a tidal wave of questions in my brain. Who wrote it? Did they watch the concrete being poured and wait until it was the perfect consistency to draw on? Or did they have some tool that could chisel concrete? And who does the c**t referred to? The word was written on the path adjoining the driveway at the entrance to a group of shops so the employees had to drive over it every day. Did the c**t work there? Was the offender fired and getting revenge? Or was he/she just drunk, saw a concrete path just about set, and couldn’t think of anything else to write? Why haven’t those businesses got together and done something to erase it? It filled my mind as I walked towards home until I came across another message carved into the path: Adele is a bitch. It was a lot more straightforward. This took a little more thought. It was a full sentence and had a definite target. Adele could not pretend that this message was for anyone else. Anyone who knew Adele probably knew who wrote it as well. I wondered if Adele had to walk over this glaring message every morning. Was the offender still mad at Adele or had they made up? Was Adele still a bitch? Did Adele ever want to come out in the middle of the night with a mouse sander on a long extension cord and get rid of it? You see how my mind works? So it’s no wonder the doctor’s visits left me with a million questions.

      On February 16^th it was no different. It was as if the doctor had carved “incurable” into my forehead as sure as if it was the concrete path. I would see it every time I looked in the mirror just as Adele and the c**t saw their own indelible messages. I was a walking canvass full of disease but I was not going to get a transplant. Instead the doctors would throw some drugs at me and see where they landed and what they destroyed. It felt like they were trying to paint the Empire State Building with a child’s brush. I was worried we would run out of time and there was no guarantee it would work. It haunted me. By the time I got to the car I had thrown away anything good Dr Comfort had said and started asking Alex questions about the things I didn’t understand. I didn’t like the idea that the plan was to get the cancer to “as low a level as possible”. I wanted it gone. I didn’t want a band-aid I wanted an amputation. But he was having none of it. He took my hand and kissed me.

      “It’s good news,” he said. “Let’s get a bottle of champagne.”

      He was right. I was not dying, at least not today.