Survivor Wisdom

It’s September of 2024.

It’s been almost three years since your brain cancer diagnosis, and I’m talking about it with a friend, who mentions that the last time you two got coffee, you told her that you’d never loved anyone the way you’d loved me.

That I was somehow special, irreplaceable.

I remember being so confused by it, wondering if maybe that was just the two of you feeling nostalgic, or romanticizing me, or not seeing me clearly.

The story I’d told myself for so long was that when you went away to college — the fancy liberal arts school with the cool new friends — you’d done well for yourself. I thought maybe I was just a familiar flavor, something sweet that you liked to recall from time to time.

But something happened to me in that moment. An inkling of a question: What if it wasn’t just nostalgia?

And then another: Could we have had each other this whole time?

Like an animal before a storm, I start spinning.

When you got your cancer diagnosis, I assumed that because you had so much community around you, there was nothing that I could offer that you didn’t already have.

After all, I’d always felt like such a burden when we were teenagers. The number of times you’d talked me off a ledge felt like a debt I could never repay, but in hindsight, you were never asking for payment.

You were relentlessly hopeful, but then in hindsight, I asked myself: Whose hope was it? The way I remember it, we found that hope together.

My body suddenly grips. I can feel the passage of time moving through me. And in that moment, I realize, as long as you’re still alive, it isn’t too late.

If I love you — and I do — why shouldn’t I run toward you with everything I have?

So I do.

Despite being chronically ill for a few years, and having every indication that my health was failing, I took every iota of energy I had left to coordinate a cross-state move.

I knew the risks. I knew that you could die before I even got there.

And I didn’t care. Because I loved you.

Because you taught me that true love is passionate, true love is messy, true love is chaotic.

It gets to be that way when you let your walls down, when you hold someone through it, when you let yourself be seen completely and choose each other anyway.

So I chose you again, the way you chose me, the way we chose each other.

As soon as I committed to you, my life unraveled. And secretly, I was glad for it.

The synchronicities that I so often remarked on when I was younger started to align in such strange and beautiful ways.

I found an apartment that seemed exactly right, just to find out that it was five minutes away from yours. As soon as I signed the lease, I lost my job.

Was I insane? Yes. Absolutely. Does love make you a little insane? Yes, completely.

You text: “This is all happening so fast. 😳”

I laugh when I think about it. It’s just so typically me, to lock into what I want and then run at it full force.

In the weeks leading up to the move, I’m listening to “All or Nothing” by O-Town on repeat in the shower, belting my heart out, singing like I hadn’t sang since I was a kid.

It felt right.

That’s when I realized: As soon as I admitted that I still loved you, my whole heart cracked open.

A glimmer of the hopeless romantic, the idealist, the poet, the passionate and electric dreamer that you saw before I even did.

The spirit of a gambler, the heart of a lion, the awe of a child.

I realize now that it was who I’d always been, deep down — the lover boy you fell in love with all those years ago, a candle we found in the dark.

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