One thing I've learned since finding out I have cancer is that it's bloody offal. I know you shouldn't expect anything more from a disease that makes your body practically kill itself little by little, but that doesn't mean I can't say it.
My mum's glass eye turned inward as she planted yet another tulip in one of the small light wood flower boxes hanging from the inside of our chipping white painted windows. Yellow, pink, and purple flowers sprinkled colour over the rich dark brown soil that filled the boxes almost to the brim. Their tall bright green stocks held up high, reaching towards the rays of sun peeking in through the windows.
"Oh, hi, sweetheart," she said, turning to me with her good eye, her false one still looking at the flowers. "Did you sleep well?"
"I guess," I said, dragging myself into the living room and settling down like a lump on the couch, the comforter from my bed still wrapped around my shoulders like a cloak. I turned on the television and surf through the ten channels we have on our black and white speckled screen.
Mum has never believed in modern technology. I'm just lucky we have a functioning refrigerator. She's always been more into nature and older beauty that she says, "has escaped the minds of the present generation." I guess that is not entirely wrong. I mean, people my age do seem to spend all their time watching television, reading gossip magazines, and buying expensive clothes downtown. Personally, I've always preferred our small little flat.
My eyes fluttered around slowly until shutting and once again I give into the endless drowsiness of cancer.
Yes, I have a right to say it sucks.
A few hours later my eyes squinted deeply as the bright lights shined in my face as I woke up. My entire body was sprawled on the couch like ivy on an old brick house. One foot was dangling off the cushion like a man with a death wish and the other up in the sky like the photo from before he jumped. My head was twisted about 180 degrees and resting in the crook of my elbow, both set in the middle of the couch. I slowly inched myself into a better position before getting up from the sunken in imprint I had left in its squishy white material.
A small breeze slowly drifted in from the window, now only opened a crack to let in some fresh air for the plants and us cooped-up vegetables. It seemed like my mum had turned on every light in the house, or at least as far as I could see, my eyes were still almost shut from the brightness. I started walking towards a noise in the kitchen where I assumed my mum had resided to. As I grew closer all different kinds of wonderful smells started to fill the air.
"Oh, hey, baby. How was your nap?" she asked, stirring a pot of what looked like chicken noodle soup, my favorite. The smell was almost tempting, but then the sickness came back to me and I vomited all over the floor. "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said rushing over to me before helping me back over to the couch, yet again. "I thought that having your favorite food might finally give you some interest in eating." She placed an extra pillow beneath my head and laid another blanket over me, like I had the flew of something that could be cured by just keeping warm.
"Yeah, well, I am," I said, bitterly. "I just can't."
"Well, you can if you want to sweetheart—" she began to say, but I interrupted her.
"No, I can't!" I yelled. "Y-you just don't understand!"
She looked at me with both her real and fake eyes. Both of them pointed straight at me. Her eyebrows pointed down in a sad little pout to match her mouth, like a small little puppy left out in the rain. I instantly felt bad. She dragged her feet out of the room without saying a word, but that's okay, her sadness did the talking. It screamed in my ear, constantly, telling me that I ruined her life. That everything bad that happened to her was my fault, like what happened to her eye, except that one was real. That one wasn't just part of my dreams.
We didn't talk at all for the rest of the night. She just sat in the kitchen crying. I could hear her sobs through the thin walls of our seemingly empty apartment, along with the noises, the ones I couldn't ever get out of my head.
"It's all your fault, Anna!"
"You ruined her life!"
"Yelling at her, seriously? Haven't you already done enough?"
"You should hate yourself. She probably already hates you. You're such a burden."
The sad part about cancer is the fact that all those voices are true. It was all my fault. I had ruined her life. I yelled at the only person in the world who still cared about me. Everything that had gone wrong in her life was my fault. My dad left her because she got pregnant with me. I was the reason she needed that glass eye. She would never be able to see from the right side of her face ever again. I did hate myself, and she should have too. See that's what cancer does, it pulls people apart because I was nothing, but a burden, a side effect, a nothing.
I just laid there for hours, snuggled in the excessive warmth of the blankets that covered me, the ones she wrapped me in. Slowly one small clear tear dripped down my cheek as I fell asleep, the voices still yelling at me with their loud bullhorns that just wouldn't shut up, not even in sleep.
"None knows the weight of another's burden." -George Herbert
