It’s Time

The flock of birds alights from the trees and flies over my car as I drive myself along. There’s a song I keep hitting repeat on, and it’s like the birds know the tune, like they know just the right moment to leave the safety of the trees and take flight.

It goes right along with my soundtrack.

I’m feeling good. I’m out on my own. I’m almost to the second anniversary of my blood cancer diagnosis, but I’m off all the meds now, so there’s no excuse for me to sit around.

Was I ever really that sick?

No, oddly not.

Scared?

Yes.

Scared enough?

I never skirted the line between here and gone. My hair stayed, and I didn’t throw up once through the entire thing.

But when I ask the nurse practitioner if I can have my chest port removed, she looks up at me sadly, and I can tell she’s had this same conversation before with someone else.

There is no cure, she says.

So, that’s a no, then.

It will return.

I try to forget the look on her face, the way her eyes became sad when I said it, when I asked for that thing she just couldn’t deliver.

I look up at the birds, my eyes flitting between the road and the sky. Down here, the tires on the van crunch through glass and rock and asphalt. Up there, the only thing the birds must contend with are the ever-changing intricacies of the breeze.

Maybe someday I’ll understand it all.

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