I Remain Unconvinced

This morning, while I sat on the floor at the coffee table staring blankly out the window thinking about nothing in particular and eating chocolate peanut butter ice cream, it suddenly occurred to me that lots of people die from cancer – all kinds of cancer – and more specifically that lots of women die from breast cancer. Now, while I have always fully comprehended the fact that cancer is a serious, life threatening disease, and while I have been with the constant understanding that I have breast cancer (quiet killer of women), I have never considered my situation serious or life threatening. Rather, I have had the tendency to continuously laugh at myself and make jokes about cancer – which I must say that I do not recommend unless you are at the point that you look like you have cancer, because if you do not yet appear to be afflicted and people hear you making jokes about your condition in public, you’ll get extremely disapproving looks, for morally superior people will automatically categorize you as a cold hearted bitch or unaware jerk.

I’m not sure if it was the peanut butter, the chocolate ice cream, or the combination of the two at 8am, but when I considered the facts this morning, I suddenly became acutely aware of my own mortality. This realization dumbfounded me – how could I, who have always been a relatively healthy individual, have something so aggressively deadly inside me? It had already crept into my lymph nodes and was on the verge of expanding the map, like an internalized version of Rise of Nations -- if its first large city hadn’t been so close to the edge, my capital would be in a very precarious position right now. The thing with this game, though, is that it’s me playing against myself; some rogue civilian cell of mine mutinied and started building its own separate, enemy city in my country. Thankfully it built on the outskirts where that kind of thing is more noticeable, not to mention frowned upon.

But who really wants to be killed by some cellular defector? I mean, if I’m going to die prematurely, I would at least like it to be by means of something external to myself; I would rather be mauled to death by a bear than die from some internal flaw. At least a bear is big, powerful, protective of its young and, most importantly, not me. Cancer is so microscopic and non-sentient. The idea of being under siege by something like that is really quite revolting.

Despite these realizations and the thought processes that accompany them, though, I remain skeptical of Bob’s power over me. It’s not that I feel that I can out think him, or even that I’m better than Bob, it’s just that for some reason I don’t believe in him. I’m alive and he’s living in me, which means he’s living off of my energy, and since it’s mine I can do what I want with it, therefore I’ll kill him. The End. I win.

It’s not that simple, straight forward and easy, though, and I didn’t really realize that until this morning. You can’t just say “Screw you, Bob, you’ve overstayed your welcome, get out of here,” and expect it to work. It’s not just there to stay, it’s there to take over.

Considering all of this, my mind is surprisingly similar to the way it was before my startling and all too obvious revelations of the morning, although it is simultaneously completely changed, like when they brought out the colorful new twenty dollar bills; it has the same function, value and overall appearance, but it’s a bit more up to date with finer detail, is more colorful and slightly more playful. But if all of my doctors told me that the survival rate for people in my category was 10%, I would automatically assume that I was in that 10%, and if all of my doctors told me that the invasion was out of control and I could expect to be taken over within a year, I would laugh harder than I did when I found out I had cancer in the first place.