How I Knew You Were Lying

I was The Only One You Could Really Talk To.

1. You’re not supposed to be happy to have cancer.
2. You treated it like a triumph. You’d been complaining about your health for years, and sympathy was wearing thin. Co-workers had started rolling their eyes at your excuses. Then you were diagnosed with liver cancer. All those people were wrong to suspect you of exaggerating; they owed you fervent apologies. You were vindicated.
3. The day of your diagnosis, you posted: “Tests came back. Cancer. Shit just got real.” Shit just got real. What a strange phrase for the circumstances. Like a line from a bad action movie; like a challenge, but to whom? It stuck in my head, Shit just got real. Shit wasn’t real before?
4. Your friends threw you a party. Even better: it was a benefit. A party where people came to support you, tell you how important you were, tell you how bereft they’d be without you, and give you money for your expenses. You’d raised a few thousand dollars online, but it wasn’t going to be enough. “Cancer is expensive!” you exclaimed, your cheeks flush.
5. Hours after the benefit, you put up pictures and tagged everyone in them. One caption read: “Jami and Janelle could only stop by my benefit for a few minutes because I guess they had something else to do. But I was glad they could spare a few minutes for me.” Smiley face with sunglasses.
6. You started chemotherapy right away. Of course you did; there was no time to lose. You posted a picture of yourself in a hospital gown with an IV in your arm. The caption was simple: CHEMO. All caps. In the picture, you looked proud and defiant and brave. Happy, even.
7. If it came from anybody else, the CHEMO picture might have seemed weird or inappropriate, but you didn’t do anything without posting pictures. When you fell last year and got that horrible scrape, you posted pictures of the road rash still studded with gravel. When the scrape became infected, you posted pictures of the pus. When the pus photo didn’t get enough likes, you posted a picture of a thermometer reading 101.9. You said you knew you should probably go to the hospital, but you were tired of hospitals, tired of doctors, tired of your body betraying you. You didn’t even know how you’d drag yourself to the ER, and nobody was around to help you get there. But if it would make people feel better, you’d go.
8. And it’s a good thing you went, too. The doctors said you could have lost your leg. They kept you overnight and put you on antibiotics and warned you not to be such a tough guy next time. But you can’t help it; you’re used to ignoring your pain. They released you in the morning, AMA, but only because you insisted.
9. (AMA, by the way, means Against Medical Advice. You know a lot of lingo. You always salted your speech with acronyms and abbreviations and technical terms. It kept people from fully understanding what was going on. Then you were frustrated that people didn’t understand what was going on. You wished there were some way for people to experience what you were going through from the inside. Then they’d understand.)
10. You were so grateful you didn’t lose a leg. You’ve experienced a lot of suffering in your life; you didn’t know what you’d do if you were asked to shoulder any more. You might even…
11. …
12. You wouldn’t, you assured your friends. You would never do that, not after losing someone you loved that way – your beloved friend Greg, who’d hung himself in high school after coming out to his parents. You were active in raising suicide awareness online, so others didn’t have to suffer like Greg did. Like you did. No, you’d never leave like that; you’d never ever ever ever do that to the people you loved. Even if sometimes it felt like they didn’t love you back.
13. You couldn’t be blamed, though, for considering it. What with everything you’d been through.
14. One crisis after another. The car accident led to neurological after-effects, which led to absences from work, which led to everyone at work hating you, which led to someone – probably a co-worker – harassing you online, which led to needing your shrink to up your meds, which led to an argument with your shrink because she wouldn’t up your meds, which caused the shattering of your trust in the entire human race because the one person you thought you could count on was abandoning you, now, of all times, right around the anniversary of The Incident, a.k.a., What Happened To You, which was always a terrible time of year.
15. You told everybody about What Happened To You, even though It Happened years ago, even if you just met them. And why shouldn’t you talk about it with relative strangers? Should you have been ashamed to have been a survivor? Sorry if it made people uncomfortable sometimes, but you weren’t going to let society stigmatize you and What Happened To You by remaining silent. You didn’t have the luxury to worry about “being polite.”
16. Unless someone asked a question you couldn’t answer right away, a detail you hadn’t considered. Then What Happened was too triggering to talk about, and you clammed up.
17. You subtly pitted your friends against each other. You told all your friends that they were your best friend – like, you loved Suzanne, and you knew Suzanne tried, but Suzanne didn’t understand you the way, for instance, I did. Suzanne had let you down pretty badly at times. There were things you couldn’t tell Suzanne that you could tell me. As long as I promised to keep it to myself.
18. You told me a lot of things you didn’t tell other people. You told me things you’d never told anybody before. Me, who’d been in your life for such a short time, comparatively – I was privileged to play this crucial role in your life: The Only One You Could Really Talk To.
19. Except when I was temporarily unavailable to you. Then you dropped out of touch and didn’t return texts or email for days, because you “didn’t want to bother” me. Actually, you said, you’d been spending a lot of time with Suzanne lately, and Suzanne said the most apt and interesting thing… It turned out that Suzanne was a really good friend, someone who’d “be there” for you when you needed them.
20. Bad friends, on the other hand, kept suggesting things you’d already tried that hadn’t worked, or you couldn’t afford, or you didn’t have the energy for. It frustrated you, how those friends didn’t listen – you wished they would stop suggesting solutions to your problems when they had no idea what it was like to live with said problems. Your situation probably looked easy from the outside – you wished you could step outside of it too. Until then, we should trust that you had your own best interests at heart, that you were actively seeking solutions, and that you had tried EVERYTHING. But nothing worked.
21. And then, just as sympathy for you was starting to run dry: BOOM. Cancer. Shit just got real.
22. Your mom was taking you to chemo, so you didn’t need anyone to go with you. While your mother had been emotionally abusive for the majority of your life, and while the things she said often caused you such agonizing emotional pain that you vomited blood, she was the only person you wanted talking to the doctors. Otherwise there were “too many cooks in the kitchen,” “wires got crossed,” “things could get confused.” Simpler to just deal with your mom.
23. The doctors and nurses and aides were constantly fucking things up. You took pictures of your bruised forearms, from where the aides stuck you over and over trying to find a vein. The nurse rushed you out of the treatment room too quickly, and you vomited blood. One time, they very nearly gave you the wrong medication, but you caught it, and thank God you did, or you would have been a goner. The social worker was incompetent, and had misfiled the papers necessary to get you on the waiting list for the liver that would save your life.
24. Between bouts of chemo, you were stuck at home. You couldn’t work – you were way too woozy – and you didn’t want to stay with your mom, because that’d make things worse. You were envious of the rest of us, who got to go places and live lives; you made sure to comment that we were lucky, and you hoped we appreciated it. (Also, it was funny how we all found time to do this or that, when we were too busy to visit and bring you essentials, but oh well – you were watching so much Law & Order, you could pretend Mariska Hargitay was your friend, LOL.) It seemed that the world carried on as though you weren’t dying.
25. You posted a picture of your bedside table with all your “get well” cards, and thanked each sender by name. So thoughtful! But cards, you confessed, weren’t a substitute for visitors. Any time you had a visitor, you took a photo with them, your sweaty pallor against their ruddy, hearty face, and posted it with a caption lauding them as a true friend.
26. I was a true friend.
27. A few weeks passed. You posted photos. Another one of you with an IV in your arm. One of your mom, seated next to you in the recliner. Your mom looked like she was frightened, but trying not to show it. What did she think about your cancer? How did it make her feel? We never got to ask her. You kept her away from your friends.
28. The attention died down. The daily updates were unchanging, the situation was static. You didn’t seem to be in life-or-death danger. You looked pretty good, from the outside. Donations to your cancer fund dried up. You felt like people were forgetting about you.
29. But you weren’t out of the woods yet! The crisis was not over!
30. You posted something alarming: The depression might kill you before the cancer did. The comments came flooding in: We loved you. We wanted you to fight to stay alive. We wished we could take away your pain. We knew you were going to beat this.
31. You were unreachable for 24 hours. Your friends started an email chain: Had anyone heard from you? We hadn’t. We were worried. Angela was going to swing by your place and ring the bell, just in case something awful had happened. Then you popped up online. Sorry for your absence, you said, but you’d received more bad news.
32. It turned out the cancer was more aggressive than the doctors thought. You badly needed a liver transplant, but because of a loophole, your “levels” weren’t high enough for you to be prioritized. You knew it sounded counterintuitive, but you almost hoped your cancer would worsen so you had a better shot at an organ. Otherwise you’d just waste away, unnoticed and unloved.
33. You wanted me to know that if you died, I should carry out the following procedure: Burn your notebooks, wipe your hard drives, deactivate your phone. Let everyone know how much you loved them. Also, you didn’t want your sister at your funeral, because your sister was being a fucking bitch and hadn’t even come to see you when she was only a three-hour drive away.
34. You were in the hospital again. Your compromised immune system had led to another infection. I didn’t understand how you could have let a cat scratch become infected, after what you went through the last time. It didn’t make sense. Weren’t you being scrupulous about your self-care? Weren’t you seeing doctors all the time? Hadn’t you just been to chemo two days ago? You agreed that it didn’t make sense, that nothing about your situation made sense, that you didn’t understand why this was happening to you.
35. You started to cry.
36. While you were crying, an orderly came in to change your sheets. She talked soothingly to you – she just needed you to move into the chair for a few minutes, and she’d be out of your way as soon as possible. You didn’t know if you had the strength, you said. You weren’t sure if you could sit up. She gave you an amused look. She explained that you needed clean sheets if you didn’t want another infection.
37. You buried your face in your hands and cried some more. The orderly stood there and waited. She asked me if it was still snowing outside. It was. You lifted your head and I saw something – the quickest expression on your face, just a microsecond, before you resumed crying.
38. Your eyes were narrowed. Your jaw was set. You frowned. It was just a split second, but I saw it, and it seared me.
39. It was a look of pure hatred.
40. You went back to crying into your hands. The orderly sighed and left the room. I stayed. I didn’t know yet what I knew. I just knew I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to. I’d never seen your face like that before: Murderous.
41. I can still see it, months later. I can still feel the cold room, the stifled trembling in my limbs, the dizzy, falling-forward feeling as I made my excuse to leave.
42. “So soon?” you asked. You sounded disappointed. Or was it fearful? Did you see something on my face, the way I saw something on yours? Did you know in an instant, the way I knew, that something was very, very wrong?
43. “I’m sorry,” I said. I leaned over and kissed your cheek for the last time.
44.  I left.

(2019)