The Other Life

Photo by Halil Can

When I was a child, everything felt possible. I imagined the life I’d build and the house I’d fill, my own version of a white picket fence. The goals themselves were simple, almost generic, which is exactly what made them feel within reach.

Get married.

Don’t have children.

Buy a small house.

Travel internationally twice a year.

Write a few books.

Play the bassoon sporadically.

I envisioned a life that had scores of music on the shelf, collecting dust and badly organized. There would be evenings at the opera, putting on a nice dress and enjoying a date night. At home, a cluttered reed desk claiming the last bit of my sanity.

I’d collect artifacts and antiques gathered from my world travels. I’d pick obscure locations off the beaten path, and eat only where the locals do.

I’d have three cats, because two isn’t enough and four is too many.

My husband would be an engineer type, someone overly analytical, emotionally stable, and perfectly boring. My quiet volcano of emotions simmering, while he remained steady. He’d let me fall apart in moments of despair over tragedies both large and small.

I imagined a flower garden with names I could never recall, so I’d call my mother for advice and guidance. We would have found common ground once I grew out of my terrible twenties. If she had been patient, and if I had been different.

Dinner would be on the stove every night, something eclectic, likely ethnic, and learned from my travels around the world. Tucking away my recipes, not for secrecy, but for safety. My husband graciously eats anything I placed in front of him, while giving me the space to breathe, explore, and follow whatever caught my interest.

The living room is lined with books, as I read one book a week, maybe two if they were light. Occasionally, I’d read a sentence out loud, insisting it meant something other than his interpretation. He’d push back, neither of us willing to let the point go.

There would be more…visits with friends far and wide. Shopping for presents for my nieces and nephews. For Christmas, a perfectly oversized, fat, and fragrant Balsam Fir Christmas tree in the center of our living room. It would be decorated with strings of tiny incandescent lights, antique ornaments, and bulbs of various colors and sizes that glisten in the light. There wouldn’t be tinsel because I never liked tinsel.

The house wouldn’t be too big, I despise spaces unused that require vacuuming. It would just be me and my husband and our three cats. There would be a study. Quiet. Overlooking the garden. And there would be writing. Every day. The kind of writing that feels certain of itself. The kind that reaches someone.

That was the dream life. Not extraordinary, just intentional. Plausible in a way that made it feel inevitable. I was certain I would be successful. Not in the way people usually mean it, but in a way that felt aligned. Satisfied with what I had built. I thought if I followed the right sequence of choices, it would all assemble itself. So I followed the sequence, until the cancer arrived.

Sometimes I imagine that life still exists. Not as something lost, but as something running parallel. A version of me moving through those rooms, watering that garden, setting that table. Living inside something that fits. Sometimes I think if I could just find the right place to start digging, I could reach it. Break through whatever shallow ground separates this life from that one.

But I don’t have a shovel.

So, I remain here, in a life far different from the one I envisioned. Wondering how many others watched cancer take a life they thought was certain.