I slam the door just before I descend into the Dark Place. Here, the floodgates open at will. The moments are few and far between, and hard to predict, but they still happen. The past and the future bleed together into something murky and out of my control. I’m in the treatment chair, life-saving poison being pumped directly into my heart. I’m looking at my chest for the first time, my breasts gone and replaced with sacs of saline, lined with bruises and scabs. A nurse is holding my face, trying to get me to calm down as the propofol hits my IV, and a doctor prepares to extract what could be my only chance to have biological children. My breaths are short and wet and studded with tears. I yank out a few scratchy paper towels from the dispenser and scream into them.
“I am healthy,” I whisper. “There is no cancer in my body,” I repeat over and over.
I try not to stay in the Dark Place too long. It’s a place where I scream and thrash against the Universe itself. The place where I remember my body before cancer burned it down, my mind before treatment destroyed it, now barely rebuilt, full of sparsely paved cracks. The place where I imagine wasting away slowly in a hospital bed, one tiny lesion stealing the life right out from under me before I even have the chance to turn forty. It’s a chorus more tragic than an ancient Greek play.
I scream into my paper towel muffler until the tears stop.
“You are not a tragedy,” I admonish myself, cleaning up my smeared makeup in the mirror. “You’ve just used up your quota of bathroom crying for a month.” I roll my shoulders with the dignity of a seasoned public cryer and straighten the bodice of my dress so that it hangs on my chest evenly. My eyes are a little red, but nothing I can’t chalk up to allergies. Other than the small scar on the right side of my chest where my port sat, you’d never be able to tell that anything has happened to me.
Someone cranks the door’s handle. In a split second of rib-shattering panic, I realize I never confirmed if I bolted it.
I lunge, but the door opens before I can stop it, and I lock eyes with the person on the other side.
Two blue-green irises glow next to olive skin. It’s a color that, if I had to describe it—knife to my throat—looks a lot like seaglass. Like an ocean rippled with whitecaps. Framing his face are long, thick tufts of dark hair, and draped on his tall, lean body is a jet black tuxedo.
It’s the Mystery Man who was sitting next to Josh. And my God, he’s attractive. But not in an intimidating way. He’s attractive in the way sunlight is. In a way that feels like a law of nature: it’s important to be around it.
“Sorry,” he says softly, eyes widening at the strange surprise of finding someone in an unlocked bathroom. He smiles, a lopsided grin as disarming as the rest of him, taking in all of my bathroom-panic-attack glory. “I didn’t realize this was occupied.” His voice is low and velvety, rocks tumbling over a waterfall.
We’re connecting beyond eye contact. Soul contact. He’s a screenwriter, about to pen the nextPulp Fiction. We will live in a midcentury ranch in Topanga Canyon, with a long row desk and one gifted child who hates us. “Dreams”plays on the recordplayer while we bake brownies that are actually just avocado and cocoa powder?—
“I have one in my purse—” a voice purrs. A desi girl with dark slicked-back hair and a plunging velvet dress wraps her arms around Mystery Man. “Oh, shit.” She giggles when she catches sight of me, hiding her face in his neck.
Safe to say the record player has scratched.
“No—I’m, uh, done.” I shake my head, ridding myself of that delusional daydream. Obviously this is the kind of guy who has trysts in public bathrooms. I didn’t realize that happened outside of movies, but this man is clearly breaking down barriers.
“It’s—all yours,” I mutter, hoarse. Let’s review: I just had a meltdown in a public bathroom at a shotgun wedding, which everyone was aware of but me, interrupted by a couple looking for a place to bang. Have I missed anything? I believe this is what the poets callrock bottom.
I avoid eye contact (and anymore misread soul contact) with Mystery Man and his girlfriend, rushing out of the bathroom and throwing a thin “bye” in their direction.
I clutch my purse to my chest and hug the wall as I meander back, stopping at the reception hall’s threshold. Izumi’s maid of honor delivers a teary-eyed, laughter-filled speech about how Izumi and Tim are soulmates. The hall is a utopia for just one night, a celebration of love as everyone laughs and whoops and claps at all the right points. Everyone basks in the light of this collective moment. Belonging is an effortless fizz in the air as potent as the signature cocktails. It’s perfect and encased in glass with glitter swirling all around.
I’m stuck on the outside, shaking the snow globe, trying to find a way in.
chapter
three
I stareat my ceiling fan, sweating beneath my flannel sheets, cataloguing all the reasons Izumi’s wedding was a miss. Lack of follow up social plans? Yep. Two failed attempts at meeting a cute boy? Check. I should addPanic attacks in publicto theSkillssection of my resume. At work, my asinine CEO always hounds us to limit ourselves to three performance indicators. Granted, his experience before this startup was limited to running a travel soccer organization in the south suburbs, but in this case, he has a point. Track too many metrics and you lose focus. Track too few and you won’t have a full picture. Hence, the Be Yourself (Again) List only has three tasks. Three tasks, three KPIs. If I had a dashboard for my personal KPIs the way I have for my job, it would be lookingquitewan. Gaunt, even.
I drag myself out of bed and into the kitchen. This is a perfect morning for a bacon egg and cheese, but with food being one of the only cancer factors I can actually control, I have a semi-strict regimen that mandates chia oatmeal. As the oatmeal spins in an interminable loop in the microwave, I stare at my fridge.
Penelope’s Save the Date sits beneath a Cancún magnet. It’s a classic design: no photos of the couple, just looping, elegant cursive informing me that their wedding is in four months, onOctober 15th. It’s even embossedwith gold foil that reflects the frown my face has been stuck in since last night. There’s nothing else on my refrigerator—besides more leftover magnets from my parents—and there’s not going to be anything else if I can’t get my act together.
I have four months before the last tenuous connection I have to my old friend group dries up.
Four months to accomplish something—anything—on my Be Yourself List.
Four months to turn this around.
After a brutal and self-inflicted ab workout, I crawl downstairs to Mike’s Coffee. I selected this apartment for two reasons: exposed brick and proximity to Mike’s. My connection to my barista, Daniel, goes beyond the physical. It’s spiritual. They always tie their thick, coily hair back with a yellow bandana, and I appreciate the consistency. They slide my Joya with cardamom across the countertop just as I walk inside. Sure, I placed an order in the Mike’s app. But you can’t convince me that Daniel didn’t actually sense when my thumb was about to pressPayand started grinding my Joya beans.
I give Daniel a two-fingered salute, scald the roof of my mouth on the piping hot coffee, and read their shirt:Relish Today, Ketchup Tomorrow, spoken from one cartoon mustard bottle to another. We don’t speak much, but like I said. Spiritual.
My usual table is free next to the stand of Mike’s branded mugs. The coffee shop has enough judiciously placed pothos that it doesn’t feel like a chain, but the consistency is the reason I have been a Mike’s customer since they expanded into Chicago. No one makes pourover to order like they do. Which is to say, pourover that will give you a mild coronary event.
I plop down in the orange metal chair and pull out the spiral-bound manuscript that I printed a month ago as a way to physically guilt myself into editing. Red and blue pens sit oneither side as I crack it open for the first time since said printing. I wrote the words, but they’ve been made foreign over time and space. There’s a concrete wall ten feet high between the person who wrote this manuscript and the one reading it.
