The Look
It happened today.
I became someone else.
I got ‘the look’ for the first time.
The look that you get when people don’t know what to say, can’t quite catch your eye and try to treat you as normal.
The look that mixes empathy, sympathy, fear and an almost imperceptible sense of relief that it is you, not they who are in this place.
The look that takes just a little of the person you believe yourself to be and redefines you as the person with cancer.
Taking a tiny, insignificant, part of you away and replacing it with a sick person, someone who is suffering, someone looking mortality right in the eye.
How many looks will it take before I am totally redefined?
The first person to call me brave, I will knock their lights out. The first person who describes me as fighting, I will spit on.
I am scared.
I would run forever if I had somewhere safe to go.
