Cancer
Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.
Toni Morrison, Love
The risk that feels manageable when you first wake up grows heavier as the day accumulates around it. Your body knows this pattern before your mind catches up, the way your shoulders start to rise or your stomach begins its quiet argument with breakfast. By afternoon, what seemed like a simple yes-or-no question has collected every reason you have ever had to stay exactly where you are. But the morning version was not wrong about the size of the thing, only about the size of everything else that would crowd around it. The clearest moment was the first moment, before you remembered how much you had to lose.