Tumor

I once knew this girl with a brain tumor and all she could do was tell people she hated them. Maybe it was cancer running its fingers through parts of her brain that she couldn't control. Or maybe it was a justice thing, maybe she was angry at what nature was doing to her. I remember trying to talk to her online and sometimes she'd use only capital letters for hours on end, and sometimes she'd show me the bandages on her head. Sometimes they had red on them, like she had been bleeding. A week went by when she would only speak Russian to me, and then she didn't sign on for a month.

I was sick of cheap translators and knots in my stomach so the next time I spoke to her I was angry. I asked her where she'd been. "Don't you know people care about you?" was my incredulous question, and then, later, "Screw you for putting us through that." "No, she said, "Screw you. You're the ones who should be fucking dying right now, not me."
"I know," I wrote back then, even though I didn't.

What makes one person that sick and another so healthy? I asked myself, and cried about how unfair it all was. I cursed God for letting this happen. I cursed science and doctors and chemicals and cell phones and anything I could think of. It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair.

And them something told me that, no, it isn't fair. But can everything be fair? The inherent fairness is in the levels of fluctuating unfairness, it is in the ability to understand and compensate for those fluctuations, to take care of those who have it worse but not to blame ourselves for having it better.

I acted like a bitch to a dying girl. In retrospect, I know this. And maybe she was right that in a perfect world, that tumor would be eating away at me right now. But the truth is it's not and I think I know why—there is no why.

We try to make material justice. You can't take what isn't yours. You can't sell or buy what isn't legal to sell or buy. If you are a child, you must go to school. If you are an adult, you must pay taxes. But these are tiny compensations for the larger moral scale, laws that attempt to emulate what is "conscionable" and "in the interest of justice". But there is no law that governs who gets sick and who doesn't, no rule saying eighteen-year-olds can't have brain tumors. For a world which embraces its laws, we have very few of them where it matters. That is to say, illness is never fair, but there isn't a damn thing we can do about it.

It was with this understanding that I stopped crying and I stopped telling myself that she was right, that I should die. It was with this understanding that I realized we take what we can get, and try our best to build from that. We have inherent disadvantages, things moral codes cannot cure, shit, things that doctors can't cure. I will live a long life. My friend will not be so lucky. The tumor was pushed into remission with chemotherapy, which in turn gave her leukemia. She will die before any of her friends get married, have children, grow old. But we cannot wish the same on ourselves, because to do so would be less fair than ever. The accident of birth is tragic, but it is unfailingly accidental. We cannot control what we are born into. It could have been any of us.