Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

NO.

NO.

These things should never be allowed to happen. EVER. EVER.

UNFUCKINGBELIEVABLE.

I’m so angry, I’m shaking. At him, at the universe, at everything. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might do something drastic. Something I know I’ll regret before I even do it. Only a meager need to cling onto what I’ve built is stopping me. But really, it’s like running to the top floor of a building on fire to escape the flames on the floors below you.

--

So. What I was trying to say is, he came back.

He came the fuck back after all. Just knocked on my door and there he was.

I wanted to kill him, just strangle him on the spot before he could do any damage to what I’d spent so much time and effort building back up. To prevent myself from doing this, I slammed the door in his face, hoping he’d get the message.

He didn’t. Instead he started yelling through the door – “Dani, please open the door, please at least give me a chance to explain myself. I’m so sorry I just left you without ever saying anything. But I would never do that – normally. This was a special circumstance that you could never have guessed at. Please, Dani.”

“No! I don’t want to hear it.”

“Dani, you know me. You know that I hate myself for doing this.”

“Good!” I yelled back. “Go ahead and hate yourself.”

He was silent on the other side of the door. Gradually I became aware of a quiet kind of choking noise from his side and realized he was crying. The fact that he hurt, hurt me for a brief second before I stopped myself. “Listen, Alex,” I called. “There’s just no logical way you can fit into my life anymore. When you left, you were basically inviting me to fill up my life in other ways. And that’s what I did. I have friends now – real, actual friends that I do things with and that are unerringly there. Do you know how amazing that is to me? It’s been something I was starved of for so long. I can’t let it go now, not for anything. You know, I actually entertained the idea for a while that you left because you secretly thought I was too desperate and love-crazed, so I could get a life of my own and learn to survive without you. Well, it hurt like fucking hell, but I did it. Now will you please go?”

At this point, tears were bursting in streams down my face. I wished this could be a dream so badly so I could wake up and he’d vaporize. “I think we’re pretty much over, Alex. Sorry, but we should really move on. I mean…just go. Please.”

“Dani,” he finally said from behind the door. “I had cancer.”

A Molotov cocktail exploded in my head, scattering glass and fire and a million emotions along my veins and through every organ. I didn’t even try to speak at first. Instead I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. My hands were shaking so I dropped the glass before I could take a sip. It broke on the tile floor into three main pieces and lots of tiny smaller pieces, lying in the middle of its own carnage. The water had burst and spilled like blood. I piled some paper towels on the minature wreck to soak up the water, then swept it all into the dustpan and threw it away. There was a mirror in the kitchen between the counter and the dining table and I used it to fix my hair. Then I muttered “Irish wristwatch” three times slowly and five times fast, watching my lips. It was an exercise to help us enunciate. My soul screamed for mundanity, trying to stifle his words. Do normal things, do normal things, it commanded me. I used the mirror to spot on some jazz pirouettes. That made me want to do the Hustle, so I Hustled vigorously around the dining table. The salt-and-pepper shakers were dusty so I stopped to blow the dust off them, and also arranged the bananas in the bowl so the more freckly ones were on top. Finally, I wrote the previous entry. After that, I was ready.

I walked back to the door and said to him, “Why did you never just tell me?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I couldn’t. Telling it to someone would have made it real. And I didn’t want it to be real, because it couldn’t be real. Teenagers are supposed to worry about popularity and failing tests and getting caught wasted or having sex, not life-threatening illnesses. Fuck it, Dani, it was the most horrible fucking thing. I was violated in ways I didn’t think was possible – don’t laugh at that sentence! Those were two and a half months I’ll never, ever get back. If I could get into an accident and lose the memories, that would make my fucking life.

“I just wanted to retreat into some hidden corner of myself and not wake up until everything was over. But I couldn’t, because not even my own fucking body was safe anymore. Nothing was safe anymore. I lived in a bubble because most germs would probably have killed me. I couldn’t even look out the window and see something familiar because the hospital was in another state. I’m sorry I disappeared, Dani. But you have no idea what it was like. I might even say that you would’ve done the same if you were in my position. Being just that close to death…it was another world from this one. Like people that live in sewers. No one thinks or wants to think about them, but they’re there, and it’s Hell.”

At first all I could feel toward him was anger. I was mad that his pain had been uncontestably greater than mine, and I was mad that if I spoke bad to him, that would make me a terrible person. He’d outdone me. But I had to get over the fact – I couldn’t do something I’d regret later.

“What kind of cancer was it?” I asked.

“Lymphoma.”

“Are you – are you gonna die?”

“No. I’m cured. They think. They got it early, and I had the least bad kind. It was just hard to get at, and there were complications. If things went smoothly, I probably would’ve only been there a week or two. Nothing showed up on the last tests, though…but then again, nothing’s a certainty with cancer.”

“One more thing, Alex. Promise me that we’re over. That we’re not in a relationship anymore.”

He was silent for a long time. “You’re right. We’ve changed too much to pick up where we left off. We’re done, Dani. I promise.”

I opened the door. “You can tell me everything.”