This Writing Group submission by CSCLA participant Valerie Gillet-Bourne was written with the prompt, “Write a letter to cancer.”
I don’t want to talk to you, Cancer. You come rolling blithely into our lives, without introduction, just shoving your way in and then creeping around for months and years as we try to get you to leave. I don’t want to sit nicely with you over a cup of tea and request kindly for your reasons and motivations. I don’t want to know any details of your journeys, or the genetic makeup of the humans you couple with. And quit blaring so loudly every single time that you’ve arrived!
As if you’re the Latest Avenger Movie release.
I don’t want to explain you to other people. I don’t want to think about the varieties of you species as if you were a rose. I don’t want to consider your stages or your many scientific names, and I get really irritated by the way you spread your shade over everything, every random conversation even with random people. And what’s worse is that you don’t add any spice to the conversation…it just withers and you keep talking.
I don’t want your reasons. My oncologist says you just do whatever you have to do to stay alive. And I hate that you’ve enlisted someone from my side to be your apologist.
No, I don’t want to go see a movie with you or sit at Starbucks for a nice coffee and a long chat. Could you make yourself helpful and drop me off at the grocery store?
Oh never mind. It exasperates me to be in the same brain with you. Day in and day out you leave your dirty laundry all over my synapses.
And to top it off you’ve f**ked up some of my best relationships, all because you hold this sick power and everyone gets panicked when they hear you’ve come around.
I.m a private person, Cancer, but you don’t respect privacy. Now I feel like I’m living with the cancer label stuck on my forehead like some nutrition fact.
I do everything I can to ignore you and avoid you. Even when I sleep you wake me up with your insistence, as ill-mannered as you are.
And I know you don’t care.
So just leave and quit annoying all of us.
CSCLA’s weekly Writing Group takes place every Wednesday over Zoom from 1-3 PM.
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