I woke up today and texted my sister to see if she wanted goat yogurt with mango, or did she just need a coffee. Neither. There’s food in the fridge and she’s already got a latte. I believed her because she said yes to these questions for three straight days before today. She’ll take me up on it if she needs to.

I got to the studio she insisted we rent 8 years ago for our photo business, turned the lights on, lit candles, turned up my favorite lofi vibes playlist, plugged in the Locket Sisters fluorescent sign that makes me feel accomplished, and settled in on one of the soft spinny office chairs. I opened my laptop to start working.

And then I looked around, slowly spinning in the chair, wondering about how different of a Monday morning I was having from my sister, because she woke up in her 15 year old’s hospital room.

My very first week of my very first year of college my Mom called to tell me she had stage four breast cancer. I didn’t understand how serious that was. I remember using all the might and courage I could muster to tell her, the night before her mastectomy, that I loved her, because although I’d mostly hated her throughout high school I needed her to know that I loved her, too. For the rest of her treatment I was able to tuck my fears for her life into other parts of my body while she endured life-saving treatment. I gave myself instead to mind-altering partying.

Four years later, as I was packing up my college life and preparing to move to Colorado, she called to tell me she had colon cancer. I didn’t understand how minor it was, just a polyp was all, but it devastated me. I remember spending that night in my bed-less bedroom, rolling in agony and grief. It physically hurt to think of losing her.

When I moved back to Minnesota years later, my Mom called, again, in that super-positive-I’m-about-to-give-you-bad-news-voice of hers, to say she had breast cancer again. It was not back; this was a new one. I was present this time around as a sober adult; I remember her vomiting, losing her hair, not telling a good family friend that she had cancer when he happened to drive by the house one day. I remember that the part of her body where her skin and fingernails connected hurt terribly, unbearably even, the second day after chemo. I remember noticing how positive she kept her spirit, and making a mental note about how this must, somehow, be related to how she beats cancer every time she gets it.

But mostly, I remember cementing my wonder about where cancer came from.

If my twenties were spent receiving consistent cancer-y news about my Mom, my thirties were spent becoming vegan because did you see that documentary about the relationship between animal products and cancer? And have you read that article about the revolving door between big pharma and big chem with the federal government?! My sisters and I spent hours and hours AND HOURS learning about the things we could do to alter our fate from the one that our odds suggested we’d repeat: the incessant pelleting of cancer diagnoses that befell our mother.

But the thing about coming-of-age identities is that they’re mostly just addition and subtraction equations that factor for everything we’ve experienced so far. So when you suddenly can’t get the math to work out on how your sister’s Monday was spent in the pediatric oncology unit while her 15 year old got chemotherapy for an aggressive cancer, you’re forced to check your work.

It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And it feels a lot like being so focused on locking the front door that you didn’t notice the basement window has been wide open the whole time.

I wonder about all the other people in the world who’ve entered dystopian realities where the truth and your worldview rub against one another incongruently. Where the answers are dissatisfying. Or non-existent. It’s so confusing.

I think about my nephew a lot, and what it must feel like to be vacuumed out of your life when you’re 15. I could hardly stand to miss one sleepover at that age let alone an entire freshman year of high school. When I see his politeness to the doctors and nurses I wonder if he feels rage, too, not at them but just at all of it, and then I make a mental note to tell him that if and when the anger arrives, it too is sacred enough to be expressed and released, rather than tucking it away into other parts of the body while you endure life-saving treatment.

Today though, I spent the day wondering about my sister. And the very different Monday mornings we had.

Allyssa