Tonight I was reading a mother’s blog.

Her daughter has cancer,
had her leg cut right off.
She’s in the first grade,
I jump-roped with her once.
She’d run up the slide,
But her leg is now gone.
I thought of her pretty,
thick, long brown hair.
But then I remembered…
God, how can you be there?

Her mom says this week
they went to the beach.
It was a good day, she said,
until they lost their car keys.
My mind wonders and wanders.
They can’t Uber,
The girls in a chair, please.
And their van has a ramp,
probably.
Do things like that happen,
purposefully?

She calls it an incident,
says it ended with a cheer.
“Just another team bonding moment”,
she adds in right here.

I stare at my screen,
Tears in my eyes.
Looking at this family,
So happy and bright.
Despite all the sickness,
Despite all the pain.
Despite all the shit,
God gave on their plate.

I think of my own,
Not so happy and bright.
A place that was safe,
only at night.
There was no sickness,
no deaths nor no loss.
Just a whole lot of fights
and a whole lot of rot.

If our keys had got lost,
All hell would break loose.
Somehow moms fault,
and maybe mine too.
There’d be no bonding moment,
Certainly no cheer.
Without a doubt there’d be yelling,
and likely some tears.

I want to believe, I really do.
If I’m honest with myself,
I do feel you.
I just can’t seem to grasp,
why things are how they are.
Why I’m somehow healthy,
and that little girl is not.
And how that family stays good,
and kind through it all.

And by the end of the blog,
there’s a weird pit in my gut.
A feeling of shame,
when I realize the what.

I’d give up my life,
to have that kind of family.
The kind that love eachother,
that kind of family.

So much so,
it’s the only answer.
I’m sitting here, jealous
Of a little girl with cancer.

-2022