Dr. Walker calls and says it isn’t what we hoped for, that I have weeks, months at best. He tells me to take a breath, maybe go on a walk, but I hang up and collapse onto the stoop, hug my legs to my chest instead. I suck snot and gurgle it, sob it out over my bottom lip and pound my forehead against my knees until they melt into me, until my ankles, toes do too. I cry and scream and squeeze, curl further into myself until it’s all gone and I’m just a head, eyes and ears, a mouth and nose.
My phone rings, skitters across the concrete, and I teeter backward and over the top step, thunk, again, thunk, again and again until I thunk the bottom, tumble toward the boardwalk where I first coughed up what worried me enough to call the doctor. I gather rocks and chewed gum, a smear of something glutinous—a loogie, maybe bird shit. I bump the shoes of a man who spits what the fuck. His calves flex in a way that makes me wonder if I’d recognize him from CrossFit, maybe Jamba Juice.
The woman walking beside the man pierces my nose with a stiletto sandal. She drags me for half a step, stops. Lifts her leg, screams. A flutter, the smack of flesh on snot on leather, and the man boots me. I ricochet off a wall and into an ice cream cart, a bicycle wheel. I roll until I reach sand and face water, watch it crash in foamy layers that grab me, pull me in, and I picture saying fuck it, letting go of the chemo and pills, the burning they leave on my scalp. I picture storming into a bar, announcing that drinks are on me, calling my ex over the cheer of the crowd and saying I have weeks, months at best.
I bob up and down like I’m being carried on shoulders, like I’m the hero who’s hit the walk off home run, but the waves push me back toward the shore only to pull me back out again. People scream and point, and fish bite my hair, nibble the swatches of flesh torn loose, but I smile at the cadence of going backward and forward, of bobbing upward and downward, of saying fuck it, of letting go, over and over, again and again.