This was not the way things were meant to be.

 

I was sixteen, for crying out loud. Sixteen-year-olds were supposed to have cars. They were supposed to have boyfriends and summer jobs and big, impossible dreams.

They were NOT supposed to have cancer.

 

But on the ride home from the hospital that day, all I could think about was what I DIDN'T have.

What I might never have.

All because of a stupid lump in my breast.

 

What was it doing there, anyway? Didn't it know that sixteen-year-old girls didn't GET cancer?

Didn't it know that cancer was something for old people? For people who had lived long, full lives already?

Not for sixteen-year-olds.

Sixteen-year-olds had only just begun their lives.

Sixteen-year-olds we're still full of promise, still full of wonder and hope and expectation.

And so no one expected a sixteen-year-old to get a lump in her breast.

 

An anomaly. That's what I was.

What a beautiful word for such a horrible thing.

 

It's funny, how that happens sometimes, isn't it? How beautiful things in life can turn out to be horrible?

Like the little dark spot that had appeared on the ultrasound screen this afternoon.

 

The cute little bugger had looked like a river rock.

You know, the kind of smooth, dark stones that people skip across the surface of a pond?

The ones that conjure up images of picnics, dates, and orange sunsets that paint the whole sky with streaks of pinks and purples?

The kinds of sunsets that make you realize that God is an artist?

 

That's what it looked like.

A river rock.

 

A lump of cancer really had no business looking that beautiful, I decided.

It was inexplicable.

It was unnatural.

 

That was just not the way things were meant to be.

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(A musing typed in the iPhones app, approx. February 2015)