“You didn’t call me,” he said. It was a Friday. I’d been home for three weeks. We were in my bedroom, and Tae was spending the weekend with me. I remember thinking it felt almost normal. Just a twentysomething boyfriend and girlfriend trying to figure out how they were going to spend Saturday. At her parents’ house, but still.
These last few months had been better. I was even thinking about getting an internship for the summer—trying to salvage what might remain of my postgraduate life, two years later. While my friends had moved on to shitty entry-level jobs climbing the corporate ladder, or grad school, or traveling the world, I’d been locked in a time warp that had brought me directly back to childhood—but with none of the play and all of the rules. At a moment where I was supposed to be experiencing so much independence—congratulations, graduates—I was now more reliant on my parents than I’d been since I was five years old. After surgery my mother fed me and often bathed me, my father ranmy errands—the pharmacy, Macy’s for a new neck pillow, battery replacements, ice cream. They tucked me in at night, sometimes my father would even read.
There had been so much going on the past two years that I had forgotten our end was coming, Tae’s and mine. It was time for the universe to come collect.
“I called you,” I said. “It was totally fine. Eisner said he doesn’t even want to see me until next month.”
Tae had asked me to call him from the hospital, like I always did.
“It didn’t ring.”
“My cell reception sucks there,” I told him. “You know that.”
It was true, too. It was true except for the fact that he was right: I hadn’t called. I did not want to be sick that weekend. I wanted to be twenty-three. I wanted to call my boyfriend about whether he wanted mushrooms on his pizza, not what my echocardiogram said.
“What about Wi-Fi?” he asked.
I sat up. I was feeling good. I was wearing jeans.
“What’s up with you tonight?”
From our first kiss—the week after my diagnosis, no less, Tae was now an intricate, central part of this unfolding new story—I’d relied on him. In ways that were obvious, in ways that were unfair. He’d held me sobbing on the bathroom floor, and my hand before surgery. He’d slept in hospital chairs, respectfully looked away when catheters and IV lines were inserted. He’d picked up my parents, bleary-eyed, at 2:00 a.m. from the emergency room entryway. He’d been there.
In the past two months, though, I’d begun to stand on my own two feet. The medications were working. Things were stabilizing.I felt good, or as good as I could ever remember feeling. I’d lost two years of my life, and I was ready to rejoin the world.
I knew it would never be normal. I knew at some point my heart would give out on me again. I knew there would be inflection points, if I was lucky enough to survive them. I knew I’d always need to be tethered to something—a device, a hospital, a scan, a machine. I knew there were no outs. But I wanted this thing with my heart to be happening in the other room. I did not want it to be in the same bed with me anymore.
“I was worried about you,” Tae said. “You can’t just not fucking call me.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “You have to get that. I’m better.”
“You’re not better,” he said. He was practically screaming. “You can’t get better.”
I looked at him, incredulous. “That’s a fucked-up thing to say to me.”
“No, it’s not, it’s the truth.”
“It’s not the truth anymore.”
“Daphne, be reasonable. We know this. I know this.”
I got up and stood a few feet from him with my arms crossed. I felt the anger pulsing through my veins. I felt voracious, wild. I felt powerful.
“I’m not your fucking patient; I’m your girlfriend,” I said.
Tae narrowed his eyes at me. They flashed. I honestly thought he might punch the wall, that’s how focused in rage he looked. And then he started to cry. I had never seen him break down. Not in any of our hospital stays, not in the cafeteria, not after visiting hours, when the nurses who snuck him in finally told him it was time to go. He put a hand over his face. He wasstanding in the doorway to my childhood bedroom, backlit by the afternoon sun.
“God damn it,” he said.
I just stood there, anger and sadness washing over me in twin waves.
“Daphne,” he said. His voice was devoid of its prior intensity. “I don’t want you to be sick. But I don’t know how to do this anymore. I’m not sure we can. You want to be free, and I can’t help but be here. Be worried. I don’t know how to do it differently. I don’t know how to not make love and worry the same thing.”
And then I remembered: our sheet of paper.
Tae, two years and two months.
I closed the space between us. I wrapped my arms around him. I stood on my tiptoes and hugged him, clutching on to his neck. We’d been physically intimate so much less than we should have been, I thought. So much less than we deserved to be.
