Page 24 of We Are Just Us

He left the dogs sleeping in the living room, and his phone on the kitchen counter, as if it might interrupt something important.

Pulling on a sweatshirt without checking the weather, he headed downhill while the neighborhood still felt undecided about waking up.

The tide was low.

The beach stretched wide and dark, sand packed tight near the waterline, glistening like it had been polished overnight. The ocean moved with a deliberate patience, waves sliding in and out without urgency, like it had all the time in the world.

Kieran walked without a destination. Past familiar staircases, past the surf breaks he still didn’t know the names of, past people who nodded at him the way locals did when they recognized a face but didn’t want conversation yet.

This was where it always happened, when the world got quiet enough that his brain stopped managing the present and started replaying the past. Pulling memories to the surface.

His mother had been sick for as long as it mattered.

Not in a clean narrative with a beginning, a middle, and a tragic but contained end. It had been a long, grinding illness that stretched across years and moods and medical language he learned too young.

Seventeen years.

Ovarian cancer, diagnosed late the first time, like it often was. A sentence delivered in a calm voice by a man who never had to carry it home. Treatment, remission. Celebration that never quite relaxed into relief. Then recurrence. Surgery. More chemo and radiation. Hospital stays that blurred together. Doctors who came and went. Hope that kept changing its shape.

She fought.

God, did she fight.

That was the story everyone told, and it was true…but it wasn’t the whole truth. Fighting made it sound heroic, clean. It didn’t capture the exhaustion. The resentment. The bargaining. The way she sometimes looked at the calendar as if it was an enemy.

She wanted to live. That was never in doubt. She wanted to see things. Do things. Stay. But she hated the way staying required surrendering pieces of herself over and over again.

He learned to read medical charts before he learned how to flirt. Learned the smell of antiseptic and warmed blankets and plastic tubing. Learned that adults lied when they said everything would be fine.

There were long stretches where she was well enough to be angry, which was always a good sign. She’d complain about doctors, about the food, or how everyone treated her as if she might shatter. She wore the cancer like a badge sometimes, not because she wanted sympathy but because she refused to be erased by it.

“I’m not delicate,” she’d proclaim. “I’m sick. There’s a difference.”

Kieran believed her.

He also learned how to be careful.

He learned how to monitor his own emotions so they didn’t add weight to hers. Learned how to stay quiet in rooms where bad news lived. Learned how to be useful instead of honest.

He didn’t come out to her, not when he finally knew.

Not because he thought she would disown him, he never believed that. She loved him fiercely, messily, without much subtlety. She wasn’t delicate about love either.

But approval was different.

Approval was one more thing she didn’t have the strength to give.

There was a part of him—young and convinced the universe ran on cause and effect—that believed if he told her, it might make things worse. That it might disappoint her in some irreversible way, or take something from her when everything was already being taken.

He told himself he was protecting her.

He told himself he was being kind.

What he didn’t admit was that he was terrified of being the reason for any additional pain.

He grew up inside hospital rooms and waiting areas, watching his mother negotiate with her own body. Watching her endure treatments she hated because the alternative was worse. Watching her wake up nauseous, bald, fragile, and still insist on cooking dinner because it made her feel normal.

The first time her hair fell out, it happened in clumps.