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Jeremy Is Exceedingly Jewish And I Am Exceedingly Stupid

  Okay, I know I told Jake that I didn't actually care about Jeremy all that much, but that belief is crumbling bit by bit faster than I can count.

  We've been hanging out once a day for the past week, and honestly hearing the fact that it's been nothing but seven days is enough to put me in a state of whiplash. A week doesn't sound like much until you consider the fact that our hangouts lasted as long as seven hours and then were usually followed up by a super chill twelve hour voice call on Skype.

  In other words: I think I'm getting a little bit too attached.

  Sometimes the fact that Jeremy has cancer just completely escapes me. My mind doesn't even stuff it in my long term memory, it just throws it right out of my brain to make room for random facts about giraffes.

  Like Tuesday, Jeremy left the call unexpectedly and when I asked about it after he came back, he explained that his dad was talking to him about a surgery he wanted to undergo to maybe get rid of his tumor.

  Surgery.

  Cancer.

  Haha.

  Oh yeah.

  This fucking sucks.

  Jeremy's given me his entire life story, explained to me everything he wants to be, everything he wants to do, everyone he wants to meet, everywhere he wants to go, and oh yeah—he has cancer. And the chance of him living to do any of the aforementioned things is getting slimmer and slimmer every day that goes by where he doesn't have proper medication.

  I don't ask Jeremy about his surgery, I don't ask him questions about his cancer, I never try to have a sappy sentimental thirty minute session where I say: "I know it's hard, kiddo—" because he already knows it's hard. He himself in his health diary said that he himself was pretty uneducated on his own cancer.

  And that's devastating to me. I couldn't even imagine being slowly killed and ripped apart by something you don't know anything about. I can't even imagine it, yet Jeremy has to live it.

  I've admittedly gotten a tiny bit overprotective. I found out that Jeremy liked video games and introduced him to some of my favourites. He ended up liking them, which was a good thing!

  Bad thing: I spent like three hours mindlessly scrolling through articles to see if the blacklight from my TV screen would harm someone with esophageal cancer (i.e Jeremy) in any way. Yeah. Not my proudest moment.

  I just really want him to be okay. I want him to wake up and just not have cancer anymore. Every time he's sad I try to bring up a happy moment of his to make him feel better. According to him, his bar mitzvah is his happiest memory:

  "Yeah, but it was like extra special! Because we flew to Israeli for it, and that made it like ten times cooler," Jeremy explained fidgeting with the broken part of his technology project.

  "What did you even do there?"

  "Like, I sung a part of the Torah, which is like kinda the Jewish Bible? Like, every synagogue has one Torah, it's like some ancient scripture. In other words, singing a part of it is a big deal. Like if I messed up one of those lines all those Orthodox Jews surrounding me would've drowned me instantly," he said.

  "So after that? Do you just kinda like... stand there and say: 'Okay, I'm an even cooler jew now,' and then you go home?"

  "Sort of? I mean, first everyone throws candy at me. You're not even allowed to eat the candy, though. Bummer. It's like supposed to be a metaphor of: "Oh! We hope the rest of your life will be sweet onwards!" but in reality it just made me and many other Jewish thirteen year olds sad that we couldn't eat candy," he rambles, breaking the broken part of his technology project even further, to the point that is definitely beyond repair and he definitely just fucked himself.