Time

Every so often I am blessed with the perspective you can only have when you've been through what I've been through. The perspective you can only have when you have faced your own mortality - the perspective that allows you to have a real appreciation that the moment you are sitting in is a gift, not your own, not to be taken for granted, and terribly fragile. It is that perspective that allows you to see the richness and the fullness all around you - to see every last detail and savor every last second - to know, unequivocally, the meaning of it all and what matters in life. This perspective that I'm talking about - what it feels like to have that moment when you realize - my God, this life that I have lived might be it - and then to live through it - I have tried, but failed to articulate it.

These are the moments - when you really engage yourself with what you have been through, instead of acting as if you were merely an observer. When you allow yourself to think about it, to feel it, to be it, to live it, to survive it - it is a different experience when you are inside of it. These are the moments when you let down your guard enough to comprehend just how it has impacted your life. It is heartbreaking, it is terrifying, it is riddled with feelings of desperation and urgency. It is impossible to describe. You don't exist there, in those moments, because you can't. It is simply too overwhelming.

And in these moments, with the kind of clarity that comes coupled with the acknowledgment that there exists a very real possibility that your life will once again be turned upside down on top of you when you least expect it - you are able to let go of it all - everything you ever wanted in life - this is the moment when it suddenly becomes enough to just be alive. I try to imagine the moment - that moment, if and when it happens, that I will be told I have breast cancer again, or told that it has spread. I don't do it to torture myself, I do it to prepare myself. Because when I try to live out from under the weight of it, I just feel myself suffocating anyway. This - this fact - this possibility - it is nearly impossible to live with. You try to accept it, live with it and ignore it all at the same time.

It is in those moments when you allow yourself to go there - into the feeling of it - into the reality of it - into the experience of it - that you are overwhelmed with that perspective that I'm talking about. But it is all so fleeting. As quickly as you find yourself on the floor, doubled over in anguish, begging to some sort of higher power for one more chance to live your life differently so that you might have some hope of not regretting everything - it's gone.

That moment that I imagine - if it ever happens - I know that I won't wish that I had lost 5 pounds, or that I had saved an extra hundred thousand dollars for my down payment, or that I had found a man to be with or had children even. I know just exactly what that moment will be like. I will wish only that I had one thing - time, and the ability to enjoy it.