Open To Interpretation

Tumor

I always have vivid dreams. every night. it ranges from being the fourth Powerpuff girl to getting murdered by a sentient cactus. At that particular moment in time, I was in the tail end of one of the most detailed dreams I had experienced in the past month or so. three boys stood atop a sacrificial temple. the crowd was bidding on a large, golden, dragon-shaped piggy bank behind them. the third boy held up the number seven. the announcer hollered, "He. Is. A. Spy!" A woman in the crowd gasped. "Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, my goodness."

I felt my dream start to fade, except the woman's shocked voice did not. Oh, well, it must be time to wake up. I looked at the clock. 6:28 AM. "Oh, no. How? Oh, my god." Hang on, I know that voice...that's my mom. That's her customer service voice. I would know, she'd just recently secured a job working with preschoolers at the community center and would take to take calls and use that voice all the time. But this was not one of those times. The last time I heard her talk like that was eight years ago when she sat at the foot of the stairs and wept. She'd just found out that her uncle had died. "I told him to wait for me!" She'd said it in another language, but even as a second-grader, I knew. I had gone back into the kitchen and continued stirring my chocolate milk, wondering why I hadn't been sad when I heard the news. (I had been in denial, and only started to cry once everyone else's tears had already been shed.)

I heard my mom move downstairs. I could hear her muffled voice from below me. Oh, no, what if something happened to my little cousin? He's the only relative who lives nearby. But he's only nine! I swung my legs out from below my blanket and snuck over to the top of the stairs. I stared at a wall as I listened intently. "......operation.......No, no, you're family, you don't have to worry about that." Family? Did my sister get into a horrible car crash and needed my organs? She did say that her internship switched locations. No, she had an AP test to take, and she was still in the shower. "Oh my goodness...did you want to talk to them?" Oh, shit. I ran back into bed and threw the blanket over myself, curling into a position that would suggest sleep. I couldn't close my eyes, even though I was trying to pretend to sleep. I heard my mom's footsteps not soon after. She walked right past my door. I assume that she handed off the phone to my dad because she soon backtracked to wake me up. I carefully stretched and rubbed my eyes, like I would every morning. I sat at the edge of my bed and waited for her to talk. She would tell me if something big happened, right?

"Your aunt called," What? Oh, no. It must be dad's sister. Last I saw her, she was suffering from pretty bad Alzheimer's. My grandma on my dad's side had dementia so bad that she couldn't remember my brother's name. "Your uncle has a tumor." "A tumor?" isn't that the type of stuff that only happens in movies, or to people in really bad health? My mom tapped her temple with two fingers. "In his brain." Oh, shit. What if nobody on my dad's side actually had Alzheimer's? Maybe they all had tumors! My dad had bad memory problems a few months ago. What if he has a tumor? "Is it hereditary?" "No, I don't think so." I don't remember the conversation ending, but I was suddenly in the bathroom, getting dressed and getting ready to go to school.

I wanted this. For the past two and a half years, I've been falling in and out of a really bad depression, but each time, I found that I really never had a reason. There were people out there in way worse situations, so why was I sad? What did I have to complain about? It was sick, and it was twisted, but I really wanted a disaster to strike. To have a reason to be sad, and not because of some stupid chemical imbalance in my brain. Lucky for me, this was the part of the cycle in which I'm actually okay with being alive.

My dad was just next door. The whirring bathroom fan drowned out most of his words, but I did manage to catch one phrase: "...second opinion..." I almost found that funny. Just last night, my dad was telling me and my sister that one of his company's supplier's 12-year-old daughter had died during a surgery to fix her scoliosis. He'd emphasized the point of asking more than one person when making important decisions. "So, we learned two things here: one, Kaiser is bad, Kaiser sucks. Two, always have a second opinion."

But what I was thinking about was what I heard when I was eavesdropping on my mom. "You're family, you don't have to worry about that." Worry about what? There was no such thing as brain transplants, right? Last night, my dad, my sister, and I also finished watching a popular new movie, Get Out. Spoiler alert, they were transplanting brains. But that was just a movie, right? Or did my aunt need money? It always came back to money, didn't it? My dad's income grew quite a bit in the past few years, so maybe that was it.

I learned more of the details as my dad drove me to school. The tumor was four by six centimeters (damn Canadians and their damn metric system), or about the size of an egg. My uncle hadn't wanted anyone to know, but his wife, the woman on the phone, told us anyway. His family thought that his symptoms were because of Alzheimer's. Falling asleep while driving, drastic memory loss...I wouldn't have suspected a tumor, either. I'm no doctor, but I planned on majoring in biomedical engineering when I graduated high school. Maybe this could be my tragic backstory. The doctors saved his life, or tried their best but couldn't bring him back to life, and that was what fueled me to study hard and get into a good college. If depression (ugh, I still hate claiming that word) was the weight chained to my feet and graduation was the finish line, what other than pure emotion would guide me there?

This is where religion enters the equation. My dad's side of the family is composed of devout Christians. I was told not to pray for my uncle, not because he's the only Atheist, but because God has a plan for him. This is his test. Asking God to aid in my uncle's fate was considered both useless and meddling in another's destiny. If his soul was chosen to be saved, then it will be saved. At least, that's what I learned during the half hour ride to school.

Now, I'm sitting at my desk in Holocaust class, typing out my life story while my friend sitting next to me periodically interrupts to show me dank memes. It's okay, she doesn't know what I'm writing about. I don't blame her for not knowing. I've put on a specific playlist to listen to, one that I would only use when my sister and I played video games together. It feels so nostalgic, and I'm still waiting for everything to hit me, for this to sink in. I can't tell if it's because my uncle is 2,668.5 miles away and we were never that close, to begin with, or if it's because the first stage of grief, shock, and disbelief, is taking three hours to finish. Next is pain and guilt, so I'm preparing a list of things that I should probably feel guilty for.

Staying holed up in my room when I visited him last Christmas.

Making fun of his bald spot behind his back.

Not making much of an effort to befriend his sons.

I guess the list being that short just goes to show how little we interacted. The next stage after that is supposed to be anger and bargaining, but that sounds like something that would happen after the operation. Maybe that's why I'm not feeling anything. Maybe I'm just too hopeful that he'll survive, and I should wait until after he gets surgery to grieve for him.

It's funny how the people around me, and in a way, even me, are acting like I didn't just receive monumental news. I don't get a lot of tragedy around here. You know, besides the crippling depression. I guess that's just how sheltered my life is. How lucky I am that this only happened now. But it feels so...normal. Like all of this would've happened anyway. I would sit in the same seat, get bored with studying, and write. Maybe that was all in my head. I would know better than anyone how strange my imagination can be. Or maybe, this is just another one of my vivid dreams.