Schrodinger’s Tumor

I walk aimlessly, hoping the sunlight might cure my incurable illness. Remembering truly happy times of my childhood, I wonder why I hadn’t realized what was coming. A tumor in the brain. God damnit. I can feel it growing underneath my left eye. It hurts to think. I curl my knuckle and chew it on for some temporary relief. The pressure is relentless.

When I was young I would dream about my future. Never had I considered the possibility of not having one. As fearful as I was of death, I figured it’d only be right for me to live long enough to grow tired of being alive. I’d reach the age of 90 and envy my friends who had died young and lived well.

Like many neurotics, I can’t help but dream up the most tragically ironic situations for myself. When I’m bored and depressed I’m certain I’ll live forever. But when I’m eager to get out of bed, and things start going my way, I suspect it’s all just a setup for some grand disappointment. This may be an emotional self-defense mechanism, but I really have found it to be true.

Anyways it's much harder to get my hopes up these days. I used to be a real emotional nutcase. ‘Too good to be trues’ ruled my life until I noticed the pattern. Now I just expect the worst and hope to be pleasantly surprised. I’d be pleasantly surprised to learn that this was a manageable condition like Multiple Sclerosis or Lyme’s disease. I’ve yet to decide if I’d prefer one of those scenarios or a clean bill of health. That would be too good to be true, and we certainly don’t want that.

I look healthy but I’m not. Judgment day awaits me. In a few days, the MRI will either confirm or disprove my terminal illness. Once my cancer is discovered I’ll lose the luxury of ignorance and my condition will rapidly deteriorate. The dark questions I can’t help but entertain will hang over me until I can no longer think. From a distance, I can begin to grasp the profoundly dark reality we live in, but once my premature death sentence is official I will be forced to understand it completely.

Some people are born ignorant and stay that way for the rest of their lives. This convenient mental defect immunizes them from the darkest problems our world has to offer. It was Socrates who said the unexamined life was not worth living, and even though he was wrong, you would probably say that too if your brain was working well. A fast-moving brain is constantly examining everything around it. Conveniently, this is the key to happiness. Most nice things in life are really convenient.

I’m not ignorant, and I don’t say that proudly. I can no longer entertain these convenient untruths.

My walk comes to a natural end as I reach the swing set at my old elementary school. Like walking, swinging really gets the mind moving. Hurtling towards the hanging tree, I remember my third-grade daydreams. They were innocent yet complex. Today I imagined myself as the doctor who would have to break the news to me. How do you tell a young boy they have cancer? I felt worse for him than I did for myself. It must be unbearably awkward to tell someone such news. After all, they expected me to be blissfully unaware. If only he knew I was bracing for it. And what about my parents? My grandma? The whole thing would be so exhausting. I think I would just request three days alone so they could compose themselves before telling me how sorry they were.

The iPhone buzz breaks my trance. A friend tells me he’s coming to pick me up. He’s in the car with another old friend. I last saw her four years ago when we were both high school juniors. I was maybe or maybe not dating her then. The fallout from our explosive breakup had settled almost a year and a half ago, so I didn’t feel particularly awkward getting in the backseat. At least my focus could shift away from the headaches.

Our anticlimactic reunion happens over a dubiously priced barbecue at a Doordash food depository with limited indoor seating. We occupy the same space and make banal conversation. Her nonchalant attitude seemed to implicitly deny the undeniable history between us. It enraged me, and yet I felt nothing.

After our meal, the two of them talk in the front seats of the car, boxing me out of the conversation. I think about how I might enter, but decide that putting forth effort would look bad. If she is going to pretend that seeing me is unremarkable, I must play along. After a few minutes of silence, I’m unceremoniously dropped off at my driveway.

I begin to feel that her nonchalance was a part of a performance. After all, the first time I met her, we had hardly talked. I was intimidated by her beauty and also her eyes which constantly screamed “I’m not here.” But an innocent text message about the one thing we had talked about that night opened the floodgates, and we began to converse obsessively. That was nearly five years ago. I decided I would text her “it was nice to see you” and put my theory to the test.

Two hours later I’m met with “it was nice to see you too,” and “we should hang out some time.” Not crazy after all. This is my chance to get closure on a relationship I never quite understood. I have so many questions, and now, distanced from a moment when they mattered, they can finally be asked. We decide to hang out the following night. I lie in bed, relieved to have made it a few hours without any disconcerting symptoms. Loosely optimistic that a tumor isn’t there after all, I doze off.

“So you want me to pick you up?” As I drive to her house, landmarks bombard me with memories. I remember the first time she picked me up and asked me to play music in the car. I am dreaming of the past, and my heart is beating fast. I cautiously pull up to the curb and let her know I have arrived. Out she comes. With no destination in mind, we roll forward and, as though the previous day and four years had never happened, begin to talk. I play a song by The Band but then quickly turn down the music in favor of conversation. We decide to go for a walk.

She and I give our little spiels and for a moment I believed that maybe that was all tonight is meant to be. We reach a wooden bridge and a lull in the conversation. “There’s a unique amount for us to reflect on, now that none of it matters,” I say, or something like that. Predictably, she gives a vague response that escapes me because it carries no meaning beyond challenging me to get more specific. “Our...entanglement.” She laughs and I don’t know how to feel.

I ramble on about how volatile I used to be and theorize that maybe every man must go insane at least once to learn about the healing power of time, because only then can they understand the bigger picture. I consider telling her that since we ended, I never felt as intensely about anyone. I decide not to, as it may give her the false impressio that I am still in love with her or hoped to be. Even if it is true, I don’t want her to think that.

Finally, she begins to say her piece. I am surprised, and I listen closely. “Back then I had been hurt so many times that I couldn’t understand that I was capable of hurting you,” she begins to say, drifting into far more dramatic territory than I expected or even wanted. “It took me time to understand I was responsible for hurting you.”

We make our way back to the car. She shares the news of her dad’s recent Parkinson’s diagnosis. She talks about staring mortality in the face, watching him break down, seeing the life drained out of him, the burden put on her mother, and everything else I don’t need to hear. This brings us down the rabbit hole. Her brain always moved at my speed or faster, considering everything at once. It was nice when we weren’t fighting.

I begin to confide in her my fears about Schrodinger’s tumor; this superimposed mass that follows me everywhere. When I believe it was there it is there. Tomorrow, when the doctor calls, my fate will be sealed. At this moment, I feel it is fluid. I really do. If I could convince myself it isn’t there it wouldn’t be.

She says it’s harder for us now with the way we live. Everything is conditional on the future. Spending so much time dreaming about our destination that we can’t enjoy the present moment. What a beautiful thing for her to understand. “And it’s not a choice,” I add. “It’s our reality. And sometimes the present shouldn’t be enjoyed because the only way to tolerate it is to look at what might lay ahead.” We are both dreamers and understood each other completely.

She rambles about a book she read from a man who studied his whole life to be a neurosurgeon, only to get diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. He wrote the book while dying to reflect on what it all really meant. I tell her this is the last thing we should be talking about and it’s best to change the subject.

We stop for Sushi, and for the first time I looked into her eyes.

On the road again we discuss our respective love lives. When I had known her, she was still traumatized by a sexual assault.She told me she finally healed enough to let her walls down, and I am happy for her. I admit that even though I had known her barriers weren’t about me, her inability to lower them made me question if she ever really cared at all.

“Did you ever really like me? I never knew if you actually liked me.” It is an embarrassing thing to say out loud but I don’t care.

“Did you ever ask?” What a ridiculous question. “I didn’t know how I felt about you. It was constantly changing.” That makes too much sense to me.

We go back to the park near my house where we once shared many memories. As we swing, she says she always knew we would connect again, that we had to. “It feels good to hear you say that, to acknowledge that our relationship was strange and intense,” I tell her. “I had started to believe that it never really happened.”

I drive her home. She seemed vaguely disappointed, like I am supposed to do something. Not now. I swore to myself a long time ago that I would never speak to her again. I had to protect myself from the moment. As we get close to her house I ask her if she remembers the song she sent me a few months after we fought. “This is where I had the thought,” she points out the window, “and this is where I sent it.”

“After you sent me that song, I didn’t know how to respond. So I wrote a really long and crazy letter. But of course, I didn’t send it. And when I went to college I burned all the letters you sent to me, and I burned that with it.” I don’t know why I said it, but it is all true. “I also wrote you a letter,” she says, “and I think I burned it too. I don’t remember what it said.”

I let her off in the driveway. “We should do this again sometime,” she tells me. I go home, and for a little, feel certain that my MRI will be clean.