Hypochondria
I was convinced I had skin cancer. I had just taken a look at my back in my brother’s mirror and saw so many moles I never seen before. Now granted an abundance of moles doesn’t necessarily mean you have skin cancer…and also it’s unclear when the last time I looked at my back was, so it’s very possible these new moles weren’t new at all, but that’s missing the point.
The point is: I have skin cancer.
I immediately remember my friend’s Dad at a barbecue a while back telling me he had a colleague who had a little black mole on his thumb, it turned out to be Melanoma, and he was dead in four months.
That was definitely the one I had.
Four months.
Four fucking months.
That wasn’t even enough time to write a moving memoir about having a terminal illness. I would die halfway through completing the introduction.
I tried to move my thoughts in a different direction but they were stuck in this interminable hamster wheel of hypochondria. Very soon I’d be dead and all the projects I was trying to get done, the artistic pursuits that would define me, would lie unfinished forever.
Sure, I had no idea what these projects were at the moment, but I felt important ones percolating in the back of my mind, ready to spring forth at any moment. And now I would have no time to complete them. I would die invisible, minuscule, having made no splash. My success would be nothing more than a thought experiment in my head that no one else was privy to.
I sent a picture of my back to my twin sister, who was also a hypochondriac. “A couple of them look suspicious, ” she texted back, “but you should probably get a second opinion.”
Though I found it rather cocky for her to assume what she said constituted a ‘first opinion’, I knew she was correct.
An hour later my niece Emmy came home. Emmy is 5 year olds and she likes to begin every question with ‘Did you know?’…Which is a little presumptuous, as there is nothing she knows that I don’t.
“Did you know…some cats are orange?”
“Yeah, I think I read that somewhere.”
“Did you know…Daddy’s name is Jacob?”
“Not only do I know that, but that’s literally what I call him.”
“Did you know….”
“Whatever you’re about to say- yes!”
Emmy and I go play in the pool. I chase her around the water with the melancholy air of a make-a-wish-kid’s jubilant day at an amusement park shadowed by mortality.
“I got an idea,” Emmy said.
Whenever a new game came to Emmy she always presented it like a scientist having a ‘breakthrough’…
“I’ll grab the pool noodle and you try to throw me off.”
“Sure,” I sighed.
So I take a pool noodle and she holds on to the other end and I start thrashing her around the water.
It’s one of the million moments in my life that should’ve been so serene and perfect but are ruined by my anxiety…Soon, I’ll be dead and Emmy won’t even remember me. I’ll be a vague image in her head, the way some of my older relatives who died when I was young are…Nothing but a faint image…And then before you know it she’ll be dead and that’s it…It was like I had never existed.
“FASTER! FASTER!” she screamed in joyous abandon.
Life was a cruel, meaningless prank.
“You’ll never get me off. HAHAHAHAAHAHAHA….HAHAHAHA!”
Better to never have existed.
“WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
My life had been so crippled by anxiety you think I’d honestly look forward to my upcoming death from skin cancer…But I don’t…How desperately we latch on to this meaningless, absurd existence that no one with any real confidence can say has been enjoyable enough to truly know for certain that death is a demotion.
Later, we lay in pool chairs under the sun.
I asked Emmy if she could name all her Uncles and Aunts…
She looked at me quizzically and said, “They already have names…silly.”
I turned around so she wouldn’t see me cry.
I didn’t want to leave this world so soon.
(EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING SOLO SHOW ABOUT ANXIETY)