The End of Innocence

December 1999

I was 17. Mole-removal was old hat to me by then. When I was 14, I’d had 43 removed from my back at one time, not to mention the dozens removed prior to that, including a monstrosity off the top of my right foot in 5th grade. It’s a dangerous skin type they said. So they hacked off  little bits of me like impurities off a wedge of cheddar. Thinking it would preserve the wheel just a little longer.

Nick it off please and let me be on my way. I was 17, I had things to do or…. not do. Either way, like most high school seniors, those mile markers of life, now considered infinitely micro, were my everything—prom, movies, hanging out, homework. Friends were forever, cute boys a given, insolence and admonishment in abundance.

I like to think that I was more atypical than that, but it’s funny what disaster filters. In some ways, I was always a little more mature than my peers, only seeking the company of those that recognized the old soul in my young features. Features I thought were invincible—unweathering—timeless. I didn’t realize that the two cannot coexist for long. The old soul wants to tear down the façade of youth and expose itself—an exhibitionist, like a middle-aged man in a dark theatre.

February.

Another doctor visit— a cyst. We’ll just do some outpatient surgery and you’ll be up and running in no time. Please come in tomorrow for pre-op.  Needles didn’t bother me by this point. The sadistic depths of me kind of enjoyed the pain, because it meant I was here. I existed.

Later, back at home, I assumed what had become my typical winter position on the couch, horizontal with a book. I heard the garage door. Dad was home early tonight. I wondered if mom had even thought of dinner yet. I looked up from my book briefly to see my parents exchange quiet words. For a fleeting second, I met my dad’s eyes and witnessed something I had never seen, a wave of grief so massive, I thought for sure he had lost every patient that day. He steadily made his way to the couch and said, “You’re not having surgery tomorrow.” Shit, I thought, I have to finish that paper now. “Okay…” I said slowly, waiting for him to finish. “It’s not a cyst. It’s melanoma.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. I knew it was skin cancer, but I figured they knew how to cut parts of me off pretty well thus far, what’s the big deal? Then terms started getting thrown around the room—Stage III out of IIII, treatment, surgery, possible sterility, special program for melanoma patients, experimental protocol, Southern California. I could feel the seriousness of this declaration start to build, paralyzing even the little brothers into sitting quietly. I watched my mom leave the room at one point. She was always doing that, couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes. I later learned that she had gone outside to have a screaming match with God, pleading for my life. After all the critical points had been hit,  it was the lack of words in the next few minutes that translated the massiveness of this news. My dad gathered me up on the couch like a baby and held me to his chest, stroking my long blonde hair that would inevitably fall out, and cried. I was speechless. I could not remember the last time my dad had hugged me with both arms and held on, let alone seeing him cry. For a half an hour I was his little girl again. Not some surly 17-year-old on the verge of complete independence, but a child cherished like I had never been before.

April.

I had just filled the bathroom trashcan with my dingy blonde hair, glimmers of my youth falling off me like leaves.  Adulthood was forcing itself  on us in all the wrong ways, war, cancer. Those were not things for children, yet here we were, almost grown, almost innocent. Almost.

May.

Memorial Weekend. Ironic. We would forever honor the innocence of our time. But that’s the funny thing about innocence; it is fleeting, timeless, ageless, and bound by our youth but touching the oldest parts of us. It burns the memory of its existence  into our souls, living long after the flush of our bodies is gone.

I knew what was coming. Eye contact had ceased to exist for 48 hours, the other contact I craved, months. The strength I had mustered in my wasted body was completely obliterated in the six-minute car ride into my neighborhood. I willed his foreign-made dashboard to do something, broadcast a panic light, something saying DAS IST EIN IRRTUM, but there was nothing. Piece of shit VW.

It stayed dark and quiet. Death by melanoma actually was appealing to this. I was trying not to scream. Mostly I was trying to absorb the smell of Tommy cologne like it was oxygen, taking in every detail of his features, but they were different, older, closed. The VIP entrance was shut in my face, after I was there just last month, 10 minutes before. Now the fallen groupie, I was strung out on desperation and Interleukin II, my all-access pass lost with every pound and strand of hair.

Despite sufficient scientific evidence to prove it, you can hear a heart break. It is the sound a lake emits in the depths of January when ice creates more ice. One of nature’s infinite ironies, the sound of building a floor of ice actually sounds like cracking. I heard my soul build it that night, a thin layer of ice between survival and the coldest depths that exist.

Utterly naive, just like in the movies when it changes everything into a happy ending, I asked for one last goodbye kiss.  I know he was revolted by the fact that I looked like a guy trying to be a girl. Like kissing a drag queen, only worse because I didn’t have a wig and only half my mouth worked. At some point early in the battle, I had deluded myself into thinking that there was more strength and beauty in purity—in owning the signposts of treatment, but there is no strength in chemo. There is no beauty in the fight, only in the victory. My struggling heart was cracked like my lips, coming off high-power drugs, rendered completely useless to him or me, for anything but surviving. He reluctantly leaned in a mile closer and our dry lips barely touched, chaste, eerily similar to our very first kiss on my doorstep two years before. I was the coward then.

I didn’t know how long I stayed in that car, unwelcome. I was a pile of desperation and despair, pleading to hold onto a single thread of hope that didn’t exist. Over the years, I would imagine that thread developing into an entire invisible wardrobe that I would incessantly try on, willing it to fit like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters and that stupid shoe.  Really it is there I would say! but everyone who knew me could not be quite mean or innocent enough to call me out on it.

I’ll see you later he said.

Yeah.

June.

Finding outlines of clouds in the dotted ceiling tiles between the glaring fluorescents. It was the eighteenth anniversary of the day I was born. Full circle, I officially entered adulthood in a Southern California hospital, all alone. The nurses, glory to them, brought me a freeze-dried sugary rock masked as a birthday cake. I think I was supposed to eat it, but coincidentally found myself having the first violent reaction to the poison coursing through my chest. Optimistically they said, “We’ll save it for you.” That’s a good sign, right? Or maybe it was intended for the girl down the hall who did not see her birthday that year. What was her name, Hope?  It was her third try on treatment. She was my age, or would have been.

July.

A new lease on life, a new beginning, bought second-hand from my youth. How do you begin when all the tools have been stripped from you from the inside out?

August.

Freshman year of college. It was intended as the pinnacle of youth, independent, scared, freshly scarred. I was changed. angry. fallen.

Given grace, but tripped over it, over and over again. Starting to really resent it.

Baby fuzz creeping back over my skull like dandelion seeds. Make a wish.

The phone’s for you. Hello? “Hi, this is [high school nemesis]. Hi. Um, I was just calling to ask you if it would be okay if I went to visit him.” What was I supposed to say? Of course not. He said he didn’t want a relationship, classic.  But I said oh sure. It doesn’t matter to me. It was only the worst summer of my previous life, but I was given a new  life so I’m good. Power to you. I hung up. My heart was breaking all over again. All I could see when I closed my eyes was her and him, and me with my weird fuzzy head. If I could blow it off, it would be a death wish for her. I dreamed of her plane crashing with she the only casualty-maybe landing on him somehow. Eventually she did end up getting flung. Weirdly, I felt sorry for her too.

January 2016.

16 years and counting. No more cancer, but it likely will come back. I continue to have bits of myself hacked off, recently some of my heart, but it is worth it. It turns out it was hereditary, heartbreak (inflicting and receiving) and melanoma. Apparently, my dad and I shared more than our love for words and good food. His was removed with no further issue, but his body was fighting other battles to no avail. Understanding the heart takes more time, but each day I’m here brings clarity. It is a gift that I learned the preciousness of life so young. Confounded and overwhelmed by it as I was, it was a gift nonetheless. One that I hope to make as valuable as possible by the end of my time here.

For more information on Melanoma and its signs, please visit here.