Up until this point in my life, I never thought of what it would be like to know you're going to die. People you know always looking at you like they feel so bad when they really do not know what it is like, and they say things that they normally would not utter. It never crossed my mind. But that was before I had cancer. The incurable kind, where your survival "isn't likely" and there's "really nothing they can do" to help. But now it's my life, those looks, those words. They're all a constant reminder of how I'm going to die soon, whether I am willing or not.

I just wish it would all go away. I wish people wouldn't stare at me or whisper and point when I walk past them. I wish no one knew, just me. It'd almost be easier that way. Oh, I'd still feel the interminable exhaustion of chemo and the labored steps I take on my way out of the hospital. But I wouldn't feel the emotional pain, the inevitable sense of knowing this could be my last sunny day, my last freshly baked cookie, my last bad wig day(because with cancer you don't have bad hair days). Not having people look at me with pity filled eyes would give me hope that I could live to see tomorrow, next week, next month, maybe even next year. It would give me hope that there's a way out of this endless labyrinth of pain, emotional and physical.

Yet sadly, that's not how my life is. The facade I put up is like a final coat of paint, covering up all the bad things underneath. I cling to it, knowing that it's the only thing that separates my old, bubbly self, from my new self, who really isn't like me at all. She's more of a shattered remnant of what I used to be.
And I have learned to wear my mask well, because now I've fooled all of my friends, family, everyone into thinking that I don't feel a thing, that their words and looks don't affect me or make me feel turmoil inside my already distressed body. But if they only knew my pain, if they only knew what it was like to feel as though you're the waking dead. To hear your parents in the dead of the night conversing in hushed tones when they think you're asleep, speaking of headstones and making funeral plans because they know you're going to die soon. Sooner than they, sooner than your older sister, sooner than your dog. Yet, they don't know that I can hear every word they whisper and that their words cut deep, deeper than any knife. Until one day their words and the cancer will kill me, and it'll be an end to bad wig days, because with cancer you don't have bad hair days.