Cuddle Application

8 - Write Me an Ancient Artifact

"dear today,
i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone."
~Nina LaCour, Hold Still

➳♀♁➳

A few days before I turned sixteen, roughly a year and a half ago, my little sister Molly was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night.

She'd been acting strange the past few weeks, less upbeat than usual. She'd been barely three at the time, small, clever, a lover of pink.

Everyone was concerned, James and I huddled around our mom as two doctors spoke in soft voices to my father. Molly spent five hours somewhere in the depths of the hospital before anyone came to give us any news. No one asked questions, or talked to us about the condition of our littlest family member, just whisked her away in a bed on wheels.

The five hours we sat in the waiting room were the hardest ones of my life. One day, we thought Molly was fine, the next, we were informed of the brain tumor.

It was like twirling the handle on a jack in the box, the news erupting from the box like a monster with pigtails.

It destroyed my mom that night.

The doctors had more news, though. Not only did Molly have a brain tumor, but the cancer was in her brain stem too, and if they didn't act fast my little baby sister would die.

So suddenly the monster with pigtails grew worts and fangs and smelled like ammonia.

Molly was in surgery for fourteen hours.

I didn't know anything. I had no knowledge of anatomy or really any previous encounter with cancer. Sitting in the waiting room for what felt like a large portion of my childhood, I didn't know whether I was going to see my Molly Bear ever again.

And then the fourteen hours were over, and my fingernails were chewed down to the nail beds.

And Molly was okay.

And the tumors were almost all gone.

And the monster was dead, save for a few necessary treatments of chemo.

My world was alive again. I could breath in a world without monsters.

And I turned sixteen, then seventeen, and the monster never returned.

I lived my life, hugged Molly a little harder every day, appreciated the little moments more. My family's battle with cancer lasted a short six months, and could have been a lot worse. Her tumors had been small and accessible, not sneakily wrapped around nerves and arteries, but out in the open, almost waiting to be found.

I thanked God every day that it hadn't been worse. I thanked him that I still had my Mol.

But monsters don't lay in the open. They wear masks, and hide in wait.

And one day one of them returned to my life. But he looked different. He had brown eyes and black hair and his name was Josh, only he didn't seem like a monster.

He said mean things, and touched me without asking, and even got a little too aggressive - but he wasn't a monster. He couldn't be. He was too nice - too charming. He didn't have boils or warts.