I'd be finishing a late dinner somewhere, the kind of place where the lighting is designed and the bill arrives without anyone asking for it. Or I'd be at a bar where I know the bartender well enough that he knows when to stop asking what I'm having and just bring it.
By eleven I'd have picked my company for the night. Efficiently, without ambiguity about what it means or how it ends.
For a long time it worked.
Lately not so much.
I turn the glass in my hand and look at the water. There's a moon tonight, not full, enough to put a line across the surface.
When I got the cancer diagnosis I had just turned thirty. Billing ninety-hour weeks and I thought that was what life was all about. I thought I was building toward something that would eventually justify the cost.
What I was actually doing was making sure there was never any quiet, because quiet asked questions I didn't have answers for, and I'd arranged my life with considerable care to ensure those questions never had the space to fully form.
Cancer doesn't negotiate with your schedule.
Six months of treatment and then the long climb back toward something akin to functional. No cases, no meetings, nowhere to be that required anything from me except to get through the day.
Carter and William came when I let them. Which wasn't often. But they understood why.
William showed up with food.
Carter sat in the chair by the window and read without requiring conversation.
I didn't thank either of them the way I should have. Almost five years later, the window for that has narrowed into something awkward to open now.
I should find a way anyway.
I came out the other side expecting to be changed in some useful way. More present. More enlightened. More spiritual. Some tangible transformation I could hold up and say: this is what surviving cancer gave me.
What I got instead was hunger.
Aggressive and persistent.
The need to be in the middle of things, to feel something real and immediate before it could be taken away again.
The debauchery, as Carter called it once, with that single raised eyebrow, that meant he had more to say but was choosing not to. He wasn't wrong.
Neither is William, who understands the why and is waiting for me to stop needing it.
The harder part is what's underneath that hunger.
The void. Not depression. Not grief exactly. Something closer to what happens when you arrive at the end of a long emergency and find that the emergency was the thing holding everything together. The emergency gave purpose.
Without it I keep moving, but the movement doesn't point anywhere. Most days that's fine. Tonight isn't, for no reason I can specifically name.
The five-year mark is three months out.
My oncologist is a practical man and he was precise about what the number means. I'm not living inside it the way I was two years ago, waking at three in the morning running probability calculations I couldn't stop. But it's there on the horizon, a red line I feel without looking at directly. Three months.
I tip the glass back and finish the last of it.
Something soft brushes against my ankle.
I look down. The cat is on the balcony floor, looking up at me with the patience of an animal that knows it doesn't live here but has decided that fact is irrelevant. Grey tabby, unremarkable except that it keeps appearing. Started six weeks ago. Shows up often enough that I've started leaving the balcony door cracked.
"You're going to need something better than that look," I tell him.
He meows. Once, with conviction.
