memory

When things keep happening, as things are wont to do, it gets easy to fall in line with a routine that then makes it easy to sink into feeling like life has always been this way. Like there was never cancer to contend with. Like I don't still fear for my life. Like it all transpired in a life that belongs to someone else.
It didn't, though. It happened right here in this living room, this house, this town. This body. And you were there for it, you remember.
I just have such trouble fitting the whole experience into my sense of my own life. Square peg, round hole. And so it is that I generally set about my days like any other person, only sometimes I want to stop and scream, DID YOU KNOW I HAD CANCER?! BECAUSE I DID AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME AND SOMETIMES I'M STILL VERY, VERY SCARED.
But usually I'm not. Usually, I feel just like anyone else. Until these memories slam into me, tiny flashes of my own face in the mirror as I fasten a scarf around my baldness. My own finger nails, sore and brittle, peeling away from the tips of my fingers. The darkness that pervaded days when I lay sick and inactive. An image of my own feet, pacing in circles while I wait for a doctor or insurance agent on the phone.
I'm still looking for the places where all of these pegs fit. And trying hard to convince myself that I'm really making the space they need, instead of just wishing I could forget them all.
Which is really the contradictory kicker, because on one hand I want so badly to pretend it never happened, and on the other I am so scared that already there are things I've forgotten.