We are still alive, but since the diagnosis, we now use the past tense to refer to the lives we now occupy. Every morning the sky is gray, and I hear her hacking cough crashing into walls. It reverberates everywhere. I remove the mask from my eyes, sit up, slouch forward, and the screen drip begins. Reddit. YouTube. Twitch. Twitter. Gmail. Yahoo Sports. Then rinse and repeat. Refresh. Rehash the same empty data that seems to serve no other purpose than feeding data and moving colors to a crippled brain. It's all just different colored distractions. It's something to push out the anxiety and grief and general unwellness. And since the diagnosis, I haven't worked. That's over four months. Since the diagnosis, I've been with her. Practically always. And slowly, day by day, I'm forgetting how to live. The routines are like slow nightmares. The anxiety has me twisting and turning, wishing to contort myself out of this scenario and into something whole and beautiful. Like it used to be. But there's no going back. It's a statistical anomaly, and there's no carcinogen to blame. No purposeful ingestion of something toxic. Just bad luck. Terrible luck. And so now she's planning her funeral and making arrangements. And I'm fearful of what it will look like on the other side of this. I'm wondering how I will shake the terror of living in a place void of you. A vacuum of time and space. Like a ghost sucking up all the air, it will hit me square in my chest. I'll barely stand steady, staggered, and gasping, and I...
But now-- right here-- we are still alive, but since the diagnosis, we occupy lives we never could have imagined.