My Dearest Cancer,

When I saw the prompt for this competition—Write a love letter to something, not someone—I knew immediately what I would choose. And I knew it would be controversial. A love letter to cancer? To the harbinger of suffering, the thief of time, the unwelcome guest in so many bodies? It’s a touchy subject, raw and untouchable for many, but for me, meeting you has been a love story—as odd as that may sound.

Not the kind that sweeps you off your feet, but the kind that guts you open, that forces you to see yourself in ways you never dared. You arrived without invitation, burrowing into the most private parts of me—my asshole, of all places—demanding attention, forcing my hand. If nothing else, you’ve got a sense of humor. At first, I braced for war. That’s what everyone told me to do—fight it, beat it, don’t let it win. But I have never been one to follow convention, or accept an easy narrative.

And I found something unexpected.

You became my permission slip. To grieve unapologetically. To cry without restraint, to let others witness my sorrow instead of tucking it away in the polite folds of I’m fine. You made my grief legible in a way my mother’s suicide and my father’s dementia never did. When I lost them, I learned how to disappear into my pain, how to mask my devastation in ways that made others comfortable. But you? You made it impossible to hide. You turned my suffering inside out, made it visible. And people—finally—saw me. They didn’t look away. They sat with me, showed up, and held space for my sorrow in ways I never allowed them to before.

You made my life urgent in a way that only cancer can, forcing me to take inventory of every choice, breath, and heartbeat. What is worth my time? Who do I love? How do I want to spend this one wild, unpredictable life?

I never wanted to beat you, not in the way others do. How could I fight something that has given me so much? Instead, I want to sit with and learn from you. You are the manifestation of all I have endured—trauma that settled into my bones, choices that I made with my body before I understood what they meant. You are not some foreign invader; you are a part of me, shaped by my past, by everything that has ever happened to me. And if I am to heal, I must first love you. Accept you.

You’ve made me take chances. Cracked me open a second time, made me braver, softer, more compassionate. You have shown me the art of forgiveness—not just for others, but for myself. You have sharpened my hunger for life, not in the vague, theoretical sense, but in the way my hands now linger on warm skin, the way I savor the taste of food, the way my laughter rises unrestrained, the way I say I love you first, without fear of how it lands.

You have given me the courage to write again. To pull my stories from the marrow of my experience and lay them bare. Without you, I might never have let my voice slip into the world in the way it was meant to. And maybe that is what you were always meant to do—not to silence me, but to make me louder.

And when you leave, as I hope you will, I will carry the lessons you’ve etched into me. I will cradle the urgency, clarity, and appreciation you’ve awakened. I’ll remember how you taught me to live as if every breath is borrowed, every sunrise a rare gift, every touch a tether to the divine.

I know someday we will have to part. You will fade, and I will go on. But there’s a small part of me that wants to hold onto the urgency you have given, the sharpened awareness of how precious, fleeting—miraculous my existence is.

And while I may have embraced you, I will not become your sycophant. I do not want to love you so much that I let you consume me. I will not bow to you or glorify you beyond your purpose. You have been my teacher, my reckoning, my reminder. But I won’t let you write the ending.

After all, all is fair in love and war—and I have chosen love.

You haven’t merely helped me answer the question of whether I want to live. You have shown me what it means to truly live. And when I think of you in the quiet of my solitude, I won’t curse your name but instead whisper a soft thank you.

And for that, for all of it, I love you.

With gratitude,
Rachel

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