Page 89 of While I’m Still Here

For twelve more days.

I try to imagine the mirror without them.

I can't.

I flatten my palms against my chest, covering as much as possible, but it doesn't work because I can still feel them underneath. My fingers curve around tissue that won't be there. My brain refuses to subtract them.

I drop my hands.

For some reason, I look at the right one. “I'm sorry.” The words leave before I can stop them, and that nearly fucking destroys me because I don't know which breast I'm apologising to.

The one that tried to kill me.

Or the one that got caught in the crossfire.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, and this time my voice breaks so badly that the last word barely makes it out.

Something inside me goes with it.

There is no gradual build, no dignified progression from misty eyes to tasteful crying. One second I am standing in front of the mirror with my hands hanging uselessly at my sides, and the next I am crying so violently that my whole body folds around it. I grab the edge of the dressing table because my knees suddenly don't seem particularly committed to keeping me upright, but my fingers slip against the wood, and I end up on the floor anyway, landing hard enough on one knee that pain shoots through it.

I don't care.

I sit there in my knickers with my back against the side of the bed and sob.

Not the crying I've been doing since the diagnosis. I've cried in Colin's arms. I've cried in the shower. I've cried quietly in bed and angrily in the car and once, inexplicably, in Tesco because they'd moved the fucking bread and apparently cancer had reduced me to being just like my Aunt Linda. Those were all versions of crying I could eventually control.

This isn't.

This is ugly and loud and completely beyond me.

My chest keeps hitching so hard I can't get enough air, and every time I manage to drag one breath in, another sob tears straight through it. Tears run into my mouth. My nose is running. I wipe it with the back of my hand because dignity left this house somewhere around the same time I started apologising to my breasts.

“I don't want to,” I say to nobody.

The room doesn't answer.

“I don't fucking want to.”

And there it is.

The sentence I've apparently been too frightened to say.

Not I'm scared.

Not this is difficult.

Not I know it's the right decision.

I don't want to.

I don't want surgery. I don't want scars. I don't want drains hanging out of me. I don't want to wake up and reach for a body that isn't there anymore. I don't want to learn how to look at myself again. I don't want to buy different bras or never buy bras or have people tell me I don't need breasts to be a woman, as though that's supposed to make losing mine feel like misplacing a fucking handbag.

I don't want any of it.

“I want my tits.” It sounds ridiculous. That makes me cry harder. “I want my fucking tits.”

I drag my knees towards my chest and immediately hate the way my breasts press against them because suddenly every sensation is temporary. Their weight against my skin. The way they move when I curl forward. The stupid crease underneath them that gets sweaty in summer. The faint stretch marks along the sides I've spent years resenting. Even the tiny scar near my left nipple from when I caught myself with a fingernail trying to wrestle my way out of a sports bra approximately six years ago.