Cancer

The words that cannot be taken back live in your body now, not just in your head where you can argue with them or explain them away. You feel them in the tightness behind your ribs when someone mentions the person's name, in the way your hands move differently when you pass the place where it happened. The mind wants to edit and soften and find the right context, but your shoulders and your stomach have already decided what those words mean. What you carry forward is not the conversation you wish you had instead, but the way your whole self learned something it cannot unlearn.